Julie Bennett

She was a favourite of Jack Webb in Dragnet. She turned up on I Love a Mystery and co-starred in Grand Central Station and Whispering Streets on radio. And in November 1955, The Hollywood Reporter revealed she had made the acquaintance of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who signed her as “Mrs. Q” for the Tom and Jerry cartoon Tom’s Photo Finish.

Evidently, the cartoon producers liked her. When they got their own studio, they signed her to be the voice of Cindy Bear.

Now, actress Julie Bennett has been claimed by complications of Covid-19. She died on March 31st at age 88.

Bennett acted in cartoons through the 1980s and then pretty much disappeared. Various sources have revealed what happened. She changed her name to Marianne Daniels and became a personal manager.

Her third cousin has written stating her father was Beverly Hills realtor George Gordon Bennett and her mother’s name was Harriet. Her grandmother was Isabella "Bella" Block Abels. The four of them moved from Lake George, N.Y. to Los Angeles in October 1932 several months after Julie was born on January 24th. Her father changed the family name upon arrival in California. The 1930 U.S. Census reveals Belle Abels living with her daughter Harriet and son-in-law George S(amuel) Israel; the family was in the restaurant business. The ship’s manifest documenting their arrival on the West Coast shows that Julie’s name was Barbera. They returned to the Lake George for several years as that is where the 1940 Census puts them.

Her first voice for the Hanna-Barbera studio was not Cindy, though that was her biggest role for the studio, considering she appeared in the feature film Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear. To the best of my knowledge, the first time she worked for the studio was in the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon Masking For Trouble (1959) as Sagebrush Sal. Prior to that, Daws Butler or Don Messick did almost all the female voices in falsetto. Barbera was looking for new actors when the studio expanded to put Quick Draw on the air, and among the hires were Bennett and Jean Vander Pyl.

Cindy’s voice owed something to Shirley Mitchell’s Leila Ransome on The Great Gildersleeve; I think both characters used the phrase “I do declare!” (Mitchell admitted she borrowed her Southern belle accent from Una Merkel).

Bennett worked for other cartoon studios as well. She provided a few voices for Warner Bros. and filled in for June Foray at the Jay Ward studio on the “Fractured Fairy Tale” cartoons. She turned up at UPA as well.

I hate to do a tally, but it appears Elliot Field is the only voice actor left from the pre-Flintstones days (1960); Jimmy Weldon came on board as Yakky Doodle in cartoons that aired starting in 1961.

She began acting in 1947 at the Oliver Hinsdell Studio of Dramatic Art in Hollywood and quickly went into radio. You can read a few old posts about Miss Bennett by clicking here.

My thanks to reader Luu Hoang for alerting me to the media reports about this, and my sincere sympathies go to her friends.