A Marine major who led a Force Recon unit and came home with three Purple Hearts spent his entire military career hiding the fact that he had once been Bambi.
Donnie Dunagan, who provided the original voice of young Bambi in Disney’s “Bambi” (1942), died of lung cancer on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, at 92.
Film historian and author Tom Weaver first brought word of the death. His representatives at CelebWorx later confirmed it.
Agents Kris Jones and Nery Lemus told Variety, “We were proud to represent a Marine, beloved by fans around the world for his roles in ‘Bambi’ and ‘Son of Frankenstein,'” and they said he had asked them not to be sad, because of the life he had lived.
Jones and Lemus described a man who rallied other veterans, loved his fans and, above all, loved his wife. Dana Dunagan, whom he married in 1992, survives him.
A Phone Call From Walt Disney
The story began with a telephone call to the Dunagan family’s Westwood home. His mother picked up, and Walt Disney himself was on the line, looking for a child whose face could help animators give a cartoon fawn the expressions of a real boy.
Mother and son then drove to Disney’s new Burbank studio, Dunagan said in a 2025 interview. Disney personally selected him as the facial model for Bambi because of his brown eyes.
Dunagan sat before a group of Disney animators who, he said in a 2011 interview, “asked me to look happy, look up, look sad, etc.” He called the work “the thrill of my young life.”
The studio cast him at six, and the project consumed more than a year, with his other films fitted around the recording sessions.
The Cry He Could Not Fake
His toughest assignment was the young deer’s cry for his mother after gunfire scatters them through the forest. His early attempts lacked real fright, as he told it in 2011, until a studio coach asked him to imagine his own mother lost and in danger. After that, Dunagan said, the cry came easily.
Hardie Albright voiced the adolescent Bambi. The picture left Dunagan uncredited, though IMDb lists him among the cast, and “Bambi” turned out to be his seventh and last film.
The movie needed years to find its audience. World War II closed off European markets, hunters sent hate mail, and only through repeated re-releases did it become one of the studio’s great animated successes.
Dunagan praised Walt Disney for scrapping early drawings that would have shown the mother deer’s death on screen. He summed up the film this way in 2011: “As I have grown older, I’ve listened to people talk about it when they did not know I was a part of it. I grew to realize that Mr. Disney had let me become part of a neverending love story in this world. My debt to him is great.”
Checkers With a Monster in Makeup
Donald Roan Dunagan was born in San Antonio on Aug. 16, 1934, the son of Warren and Louise Dunagan. The family later settled in Memphis, Tenn.
At three, he won $100 in a tap-dance competition in Memphis. An RKO scout was watching from the crowd, and the family was soon on a train to Los Angeles.
He won his first screen role at an audition, in Rowland V. Lee’s “Mother Carey’s Chickens” (1938), a cast that included Anne Shirley, Ruby Keeler and Walter Brennan.
Lee brought the curly-haired blond boy back for 1939’s “Son of Frankenstein,” casting him as Peter, son of Basil Rathbone’s Baron Wolf von Frankenstein. Between setups, Dunagan played checkers against Boris Karloff, still in his full monster makeup, and once took four bits from the star.
Lee cast him the same year in “Tower of London,” where his Baby Prince was wed in an arranged chapel ceremony to Joan Carroll’s seven-year-old Lady Mowbray. Budget worries nearly got the comic scene cut. Dunagan said in 2004 that he kept his part only because Rathbone, fed up with losing scenes from the script, stood up for it.
His other appearances included “The Forgotten Woman” (1939), George Stevens’ “Vigil in the Night” (1940) and “Meet the Chump” (1941). His parents divorced, and the Hollywood years ended.
After the divorce he spent time living in an orphanage and a boarding school, worked odd jobs in high school and took a football scholarship to the University of Alabama before volunteering for the Marines.
The Secret He Kept From Marines
Dunagan became the youngest drill sergeant in Corps history and spent a quarter-century in uniform without telling a soul there about Bambi.
He served three tours in Vietnam, working in counterintelligence and leading a Force Recon unit. One wound, he said, was a bullet through his left knee.
He retired as a major in 1977 with a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts among other decorations. The rest of the list included the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with V device, an Army Commendation Medal and two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals.
He never mentioned the deer in all those years because he did not want to be teased as “Major Bambi.” He had not even told his future wife, he told StoryCorps.
Years later, he counted keeping the secret from his closest Marine friends among his deepest regrets. He said he had not been brave enough to tell them.
After the Corps he built a finance career in New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio, eventually taking the top job at Pace Corp. Late in life he stopped hiding the role and leaned into it, signing autographs for fans at conventions.
“But I love it now when people realize this old jerk — still alive and was Bambi,” he told NPR in 2015.
Dunagan attended the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 75th anniversary screening of “Bambi” on May 15, 2017, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
