Mary Kay Bergman

The origins of Bergman's voice acting can be traced to when she attended a housewarming party at one of her co-workers' houses. Someone brought a karaoke machine to the party and Bergman started "going wild", using several different voices. One of the guests at the party was studying with voice-over coach Kat Lehman and suggested she take a class with his teacher, which she did.[2]

Bergman took many voice-over classes in order to do many different styles and voices. Some specialized in animation, some in ADR/looping, and others in commercial and improvisation. Bergman studied the voice of a character if she was matching a voice.[15][16] Bergman stated that accents came very easily to her. She stated that she enjoyed doing accents such as Chinese, Japanese, Australian, English, American, French, German, Spanish and Italian.[15]

In 1994,[17] Bergman started teaching the technique of doing voice-overs for animation at the Kalmenson and Kalmenson Studios in Burbank, California.[9][15] After voicing the villain Dr. Blight on the series Captain Planet and the Planeteers, replacing Meg Ryan, she acquired a reputation for voice matching and began doing these matches for other actors such as Jodie Foster, Gillian Anderson, Helen Hunt, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Tilly, Emma Thompson, and Alfre Woodard.[18]

After her first voice role as a frightened woman in a radio commercial for a small home security company on a local station in 1986,[15][16] and a few more radio spots in 1989, Bergman was not making enough to earn a living, so she worked part-time at Robinson’s department store. During this time, she got the role with Disney as the voice of Snow White on tape, replacing Adriana Caselotti.[18] She told her boss she needed the day off for the recording, but he refused and she left the post.[18]

Disney was pleased with her performance, but she agreed to accept future jobs only when Caselotti was unavailable. She later learned that Disney had different plans.[19] When Disney was releasing a restored version of Snow White, Caselotti was brought back in to record a scene that was missing its audio track. After the studio executives listened to her work, they chose to have Bergman record the scene instead. Caselotti was unaware her voice had been replaced until the 1993 Academy Awards, when she heard Bergman as Snow White presenting an award for best animated short subject. Disney received hundreds of complaints after the ceremony, noting the changes to the Snow White character that Jeffrey Katzenberg had made. Katzenberg apologized, and Bergman did not publicly admit to voicing Snow White while Caselotti was still alive.[19]

Bergman was the original voice for most of the female characters for South Park and the feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999). Her characters included Liane Cartman, Sheila Broflovski, Shelly Marsh, Sharon Marsh, Carol McCormick and Wendy Testaburger. She was originally credited as Shannen Cassidy (taken from stars Shannen Doherty and David Cassidy) out of concerns regarding possible conflicts with her continued work as Disney's official Snow White voice. "It was a conscious decision to be anonymous at first, because none of us knew the show would be a hit, and if anyone tells you they did, they're lying", she said. "Then it did hit, and Shannen Cassidy was getting mail like Santa Claus, so we transitioned out of it." Bergman credited South Park for pulling her out of a typecasting rut. "I'm known for these sweet, cute little characters", she said, noting her roles in various Disney films. "So I've been doing them forever. My agents were trying to submit me on shows that are edgy, and they're laughing, 'Mary Kay, are you kidding? No way!'" After Bergman's death, the two episodes "Starvin' Marvin in Space" (the final episode for which she recorded original dialogue) and "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics" (the final episode in which her voice was used via archive footage) were dedicated in her memory.[20]

Bergman worked on over 400 television commercials, including the voice of Mrs. Butterworth in Mrs. Butterworth's syrup commercials. She had roles in many Disney films, including Beauty and the Beast, as the Bimbettes; The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as Quasimodo's mother and Djali; Hercules, as several female characters; Mulan, as the female ancestors; and the posthumously released Toy Story 2, in which she is credited under "additional voices." Her appearances in video games included The Curse of Monkey Island.

She worked on other series including Jay Jay the Jet Plane, Oh Yeah! Cartoons, The Fairly OddParents, and several female voices in The Tick animated series. She also provided the voice of Gwen Stacy in the final episode of Spider-Man. Bergman voiced the Scooby-Doo character Daphne Blake in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998), Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost (1999) and Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders (2000), this last one being a posthumous release and final film role, dedicated to her. Her other film role was in Balto II: Wolf Quest (2002), released three years after her death, in which she voiced a vixen and a wolverine.

Bergman contributed vocals to the "Weird Al" Yankovic song "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi", alongside Tress MacNeille. Al stated:

Originally I had Mary Kay come in to sing the whole song. I basically wanted her to do the voice of Kyle's mom from South Park. Her agent wouldn't let her do it (thinking that it might get her in trouble with Comedy Central)—so Mary Kay wound up doing kind of a squeaky voice instead. Later, I decided that the "squeaky voice" thing really wasn't what I was looking for, so I called in my old friend Tress to do her Fran Drescher impersonation instead. The part that you can still hear Mary Kay on is the line in the middle of the song where she does the very Gentile-sounding "for a Rab-bi...".[21]

Grave of Mary Kay Bergman, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, featuring etchings of characters she voiced on South Park

Dino Andrade established the Mary Kay Bergman Memorial Fund,[1] which contributes to operation of the Suicide Prevention Center at the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center.[27] To benefit the Mary Kay Bergman Memorial Fund, a Memorial Celebration and Concert was held in March 2000. Many industry voice actors came to the event including Jane Jacobs, Mona Marshall (who would be one of her South Park successors), Barbara Goodson and Diane Michelle, all of whom sang in the choir. The service was held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in the Blossom Room, where the first Academy Awards was presented in 1929.[28] Also contributing to the memorial fund was March 28, 2000's Los Angeles edition of the Daily Variety magazine, which ran a full-page Oscar version of the Open Letter to All by Andrade.[29]

Bob's Video, made by Mary Kay & Dino's production company, Klaxon Filmworks, had been completed before Bergman died but was posthumously shown at the HBO Urban World Film Festival, at the Blue Sky Festival, and at a Mary Kay Bergman memorial screening. This included her only live-action role, a few voice roles, still photography, and work as executive producer for the film.[30]

Bergman's interview on Nightcap, a show by Chapman University, was recorded on November 5, 1999, but was aired posthumously. The episode was dedicated to her.[31]

Al Lowe, who had worked with Bergman on three Leisure Suit Larry video games, posted a tribute to her on his website. He stated, "Mary Kay was the sort of person who could light up a room just by entering. She was a joy to work with and made me look good as a novice voice-over director. It was therefore even more shocking when I learned that she had taken her own life."[32]

Bergman is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.[24]

In an August 2010 interview, Bergman's friend and student Grey DeLisle, who inherited the role of Daphne Blake in the Scooby-Doo franchise, said of her:

She was just the sweetest, most wonderful person in the world... and then she killed herself. Her husband came and stayed with me at my house, because he said, "I can't stay over there, it's too painful." And about a week later, they asked me to audition for Daphne ... and I didn't know what to do, because I just thought, "Gosh, I just don't know if I can do that." I told him, "They asked me to audition, but I'm not going to audition, because it's just weird." And he said, "Grey, you have to do it, because Mary Kay would've wanted you to do it. You were her star student, she loved you, and she would've wanted you to do Daphne. Somebody's going to do it. It might as well be someone who loved her." And I was, like, "I didn't really think about it like that." So I went in, and I didn't study it, because I just thought, "You know what? I’m just going to go in, and I’m just going to do my best interpretation of the character. I'm not going to try and sound-match her, because it would just be too sad to listen to her voice." So I went in, and Eddie – the engineer at the time – and Collette Sunderman, the director, she just said, "When you came in, Grey, it was just eerie. It was like there was some other hand in it, because you sounded exactly like Mary Kay." So I guess it was meant to be, because I didn't try. It just came out that way. They wanted me to speak at her memorial, and her husband really wanted me to speak, but I just couldn't talk. I just kept crying and crying and... oh, would you look at me with the crying? Here I am talking about crying again. (Laughs) You're thinking, "This girl's a mess!" But, yeah, it was an interesting turn of events to get to play Daphne, but I'm so glad that I have the role, and I was glad that I was able to carry that on for her. She set the bar very high.[33]

In a March 2000 interview, South Park creators and stars Matt Stone and Trey Parker said about Bergman:

We kind of realized right away that one person wasn't going to do it, cause that's what she was amazing at, which was she could do so many different voices, and we had her just do all of them cause she could. And so we knew, and we know, we're still in the process of finding a lot of talented voice people there that can do one or two of the voices that she did. But it's going to take four to five people to replace her. ... Because we are in this thing where we do shows two weeks ahead of time, when it happened it was really tough because we had three shows to do ... and we knew we weren't going to find anyone at the time, so we just wrote three episodes with no female characters in them.[34]

Voice actress Tara Strong, who was one of Bergman's friends, received a pet dog from Bergman for her 26th birthday. In tribute to her, Strong replaced Bergman as the voice of Timmy Turner in the Nickelodeon cartoon The Fairly OddParents, redubbing Bergman's lines from the Oh Yeah! Cartoons era.[35]