Someone in the world of voice acting who doesn’t get the same recognition as people like Mel Blanc, June Foray, Bill Thompson or Stan Freberg but who you will definitely recognize, especially if you grew up watching Golden Age WB and MGM cartoons, is Sara Berner.

Berner was born in Albany, New York in 1912 before moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma as a teenager. She found her passion to perform after watching vaudeville shows and silent films, studying drama at the University of Tulsa for two years and even getting the opportunity to perform on stage at a young age when she was cast in the popular Anne Nichols comedy Abie’s Irish Rose.

After moving to Philadelphia and attempting to work a normal job at a department store (she got fired for mimicking the voice of a customer), she got the opportunity to host her own local radio program. This must have given her some confidence because after that she moved back to New York to pursue a career in show business. Maybe that radio work looked good on her resumé but she got hired pretty quickly after auditioning for Major Edward Bowes to be a part of his amateur hour, performing in an all-girl vaudeville act beginning in 1937. One of the stage personas she created was actually based on her department store experience when she played a saleslady who did impressions of celebrities like Katharine Hepburn and Mae West (luckily show business paid a lot more than work at a Philly department store).

After her four-year tour with Bowes, Berner returned to radio where she scored recurring roles on popular shows like Fibber McGee & Molly, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and The Jack Benny Program, the latter featuring Berner in a regular role as Jack Benny’s girlfriend Gladys as well as Mabel Flapsaddle the gossipy telephone operator opposite Bea Benaderet’s Gertrude Gearshift.

These voice roles in radio were where many Americans first discovered Sara Berner, and that included Hollywood’s animators who initially used her voice in cartoons when they needed to imitate celebrities in such films as Disney’s Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938), Walter Lantz’s Hollywood Bowl (1938) and WB’s Hollywood Steps Out (1941).

In the forties Sara Berner voiced more animal characters, starting when Lantz hired her to voice Andy Panda based on the strength of her Hepburn impression. Other animated characters you may have heard Berner voice include Mama Buzzard from the Merrie Melodies cartoon Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid (1942) aka Beaky Buzzard’s mom with the heavy Eastern European accent, Mayzie from Horton Hatches the Egg (1942), the singing straw hat-wearing flea (“There’ll be food around the corner”) from An Itch in Time (1943), the speaking voice of Red in Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), the female feline from the Tom and Jerry cartoon The Zoot Cat (1944), Cinderella’s speaking voice in Swing Shift Cinderella (1945), Jerry Mouse in the 1945 musical Anchors Aweigh (in which he famously danced alongside a live-action Gene Kelly) and the penguin Chilly Willy (only during Chilly Willy’s theme song – he’s largely silent in the actual cartoons) beginning in 1953.

In addition to her roles in radio and animation, Berner’s voice was heard in a camel in the film Road to Morocco (1942) and she was seen in various films throughout the forties and fifties including William Wyler’s Carrie (1952) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), as well as television shows like The Jack Benny Program, This Is Your Life, Four Star Revue, The Red Skelton Show, Hour of Stars and the CBS anthology drama Playhouse 90.

Sara Berner was a lot less active in the sixties but she appeared a few more times on television before her death in 1969. During her career she was highly regarded. Eddie Cantor, who Berner worked with on radio in the thirties, praised Berner as the “greatest impersonator and dialectician of all time,” WB’s animators called her the female Mel Blanc and she was a very popular entertainer with U.S. troops during World War II, who she regularly performed for.