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Norma Macmillan

Voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost

(September 15, 1921—March 16, 2001)

Norma Macmillan was the voice of countless Saturday mornings, her acting skill making real for children the vulnerability of such cartoon characters as Sweet Polly Purebred and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

A short woman with a pixie face, Macmillan was known for her sharp wit and determination both in private and in performance. She appeared in more than a hundred stage productions before becoming a voice for cartoon and animated characters with credits including such 1960s staples as Underdog, The Gumby Show and Davey and Goliath.

In her later years, Macmillan took on bit roles as an actor. She performed with Katharine Hepburn in the 1986 made-for-TV movie Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry; was hacked to death by axe in Nightmare on the 13th Floor (1990); and portrayed a bumbling nurse who mixed up two sets of twin girls in Big Business, a 1988 comedy starring Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin.

A doctor’s daughter born in Vancouver, she attended Prince of Wales and York House schools before graduating from Trinity College in London. She met her future husband, producer Thor Arngrim, while working on a production for the groundbreaking Totem Theatre in her hometown. They were married in 1954.

They became a celebrated Hollywood couple. Arngrim was personal manager to Liberace and Debbie Reynolds, among other clients, while also handling the careers of their children, Stefan Arngrim (Barry Lockridge in Land of the Giants) and Alison Arngrim (Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie).

While her voice work and movie acting earned the praise of her peers, the public recognized Macmillan mostly as an actor in commercials. She was cast as a dotty, flighty and angry senior for such clients as the Yellow Pages (as Alice Rootweevil) and Kraft Mayonnaise (as Aunt Martha), whose memorable, if annoying, slogan was a tart “It’s creamier!”

It was her special talent to make a two-dimensional cartoon character seem a flesh-and-blood human. The nuance of her voice expressed a child’s playfulness, pugnaciousness and vulnerability.

One of her early children’s roles was as the voice of Fitzgerald Fieldmouse, a puppet friend of the title character on Maggie Muggins, a fifteen-minute, after-school program that ran from 1955 to 1962 on CBC Television.

She performed the voice of Kokette to Larry Storch’s Koko the Clown in a hundred animated short cartoons.

Macmillan’s incarnation of the friendly ghost captured the lonely spirit of a boy whose disembodied nature too often scared away those he wished to befriend.

On the Gumby series, an early Claymation effort featuring the adventures of a green clay boy and his pink clay horse, Macmillan was the voice of Goo, a blue blob and a rare female presence. She also voiced Gumby for a few seasons.

In Davey and Goliath (1962), Macmillan handled the voice chores of Davey, a brown-haired boy in tidy slacks and a red-striped shirt whose curiosity got him into minor scrapes. Goliath, voiced by Hal Smith, who portrayed Otis the Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show, was Davey’s dim-witted conscience, whose trademark was a cautionary “But Da-a-a-a-vey.”

The show blazed a progressive path by portraying Davey’s best friend as a black boy at a time when few black characters of any kind were seen on television. The boys’ racial difference was unremarked upon save for a single episode titled “Difference” that offered a lesson in tolerance.

The makers of The Simpsons acknowledge the show’s pop-culture status by occasionally incorporating a reference such as having the doorbell at the Flanders’ house play the Davey and Goliath theme song.

Macmillan was already the best-known child’s voice in the United States when she was cast to play the role of US President John F. Kennedy’s children, Caroline and baby John-John, for a comedy album starring little-known comic Vaughn Meader. The First Family, mild satire by today’s standards, gently poked at the foibles of a young president’s family. The album struck a funny bone in middle America in the late fall of 1962, selling more than seven million copies in two months.

Macmillan posed for the album’s cover in a pink gingham dress with bared arms and legs, a pink barrette in her hair, a sun bonnet on her head, holding a yellow balloon.

Kennedy’s assassination a year later abruptly ended Meader’s comedy career. By then, Macmillan had already returned to the sound booth.

Another of her memorable animated television characters was Sweet Polly Purebred, a TV reporter in peril who called upon her boyfriend Underdog (Wally Cox) to rescue her from such evil-doers as Riff Raff and evil scientist Simon Bar Sinister, who wanted citizens to do as “Simon says.” Underdog, a mild parody of Superman, ran from 1964 until 1973, making Macmillan’s voice familiar as Polly Purebread crying, “Oh where, oh where has my Underdog gone? Oh where, oh where can he be?”

Her voice can be heard on many other cartoon series, including as Li’LRok in Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor, as well as on many animated commercials. She was heard by another generation of children doing miscellaneous voices for cartoon episodes of the Smurfs and Go Bots.

Much less well known was her work as a playwright. A Crowded Affair, a witty exposé of social mores in a privileged Vancouver milieu written in the style of Noel Coward, is credited as the first play with a British Columbia setting to have been written by a woman. Macmillan also wrote Free As a Bird, a screwball, Cold War comedy that starred the Tony Award-winning comedienne Edie Adams.

She returned to her Vancouver birthplace in 1994, hosting a weekly program for seniors on Co-op Radio.

For many years, she worked on a novel, a multigenerational saga in the style of The Thorn Birds, beginning at the moment of contact between the indigenous peoples and the Europeans. She’d visit Vancouver Island for inspiration, staying in isolated cabins, a glass of Scotch beside her trusted Olivetti portable typewriter. (At home, she preferred a large bag of popcorn.)

Macmillan got a literary agent, had a mockup of the book constructed and shopped it around. The British television host David Frost found it cinematic in structure, and there was some interest expressed in turning it into a movie, or television series. But, as is so often the nature of these things, nothing happened.

On her death, her family came across a box filled with a typescript on sheaves of the cheapest newsprint in pink, green and beige, a literary spumoni. Arngrim vowed to get the novel published.

Nine years later, after substantial revisions by the journalist Charles Campbell, TouchWood Editions of Victoria released The Maquinna Line: A Family Saga. The reviews were favourable.

Arngrim was in the intensive-care unit at St. Paul’s Hospital, battling Parkinson’s disease, when presented a colour copy of the cover for his late wife’s novel. He did not live long enough to see the finished product, but died knowing he had fulfilled a promise.

April 3, 2001