Name Bernice Hansen | Role Voice actress | |
Died April 16, 1981, Los Angeles, California, United States Parents Edward Hansell, T. Belle Hansell Movies I Haven't Got a Hat, Elmer Elephant, I Love to Singa, Cinderella Meets Fella, Naughty Neighbors Similar People Leon Schlesinger, Tex Avery, Ben Hardaway, Walter Lantz, Friz Freleng | ||
Berneice Edna Hansell (1897–1981), known as Bernice Hansen, provided the voice for female and young characters in the mid to late 1930s for various cartoon studios, most notably Warner Bros., where she played Little Kitty in I Haven't Got a Hat (1935).
Because of a lack of on-screen voice credits on cartoons throughout the 1930s, identifying many actors has been a challenge to historians, resulting in incorrect guesses, especially with many female voices portraying young animals that sound very similar. She has, for example, been incorrectly identified as providing the voice of Sniffles.
Hansell was born in Los Angeles, California on July 11, 1897 to Edward and T. Belle (Carey) Hansell. Her father was an Englishman who arrived in the United States in 1877. Her mother was from Iowa. Edward Hansell worked as a jeweller and then an optician during the 1920s, and as an elevator operator during the Depression of the 1930s. Hansell found work as a stenographer and then as a dressmaker on the Warner Bros. lot She managed to find work in cartoons at the Walt Disney Studio and provided squeaks for Mickey Mouse. That same year, she found work in the Leon Schlesinger and Walter Lantz studios.
Her animation career petered out in the early 1940s. She died in Los Angeles on April 16, 1981, age 83. She never married.