Norma MacMillan; Cartoons’ Voice

She was woeful little Casper the Friendly Ghost who frightened people in spite of himself. Or she was the bendable green Gumby or Sweet Polly Purebred, the damsel underdog always found in distress. That’s how you would identify her if you heard her light, airy voice.

It you saw her picture, you might remember her as the flighty, innocent, sweet Aunt Martha, who along with bossy Aunt Harriet discovered the gourmet taste of Kraft Real Mayonnaise in the 1980s.

Norma MacMillan, who provided the voice for cartoon characters that delighted a generation and sold everything from cars to food products in myriad commercials, has died. She was 79.

MacMillan died Friday of a heart attack in her native Vancouver, Canada. She had returned there to retire in 1994 with her husband, producer and manager Thor Arngrim.

Aunt Martha, MacMillan told The Times in 1986, five years after she and actress Ruth Manning made their first Kraft commercial, “really is not like me. I usually play the Auntie Mame type.”

Though best known for her sweet, youthful voices, MacMillan throughout her four-decade career was a respected supporting actress in stage plays, films and television movies. She appeared with Katharine Hepburn in television’s “Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry” and in regional theaters as Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie.”

Among her films were “Head Over Heels” and “Big Bully.”

A year after her retirement, MacMillan provided what one reviewer called a “first-rate” supporting performance in the 1995 CBS television movie “Dangerous Intentions.” Filmed in Vancouver and starring Donna Mills and Corbin Bernsen, the production dealt with domestic violence.

MacMillan and Manning began doing the long-running mayonnaise commercials in 1981, as two conspiring “aunts” preparing meals for potluck get-togethers. MacMillan’s submissive gestures and sweet, honest reactions as Aunt Martha made her a perfect sidekick to the controlling Aunt Harriet.

It was Harriet who delivered the punch line, “Don’t tell her,” after MacMillan naively suggested they had to inform a relative in Kansas about their discovery of the whipped delight. Another popular wisecrack from the series, which found its way into the American lexicon, was, “Oh, we’re free for lunch,” after the aunts had been converted to the delicious product.

Took Commercial Acting Seriously

A consummate professional actress, MacMillan never considered that commercials were beneath her talents. It was all acting.

MacMillan recalled attending a class for commercial actors, and being thrilled to recognize a fellow student, exclaiming to herself: “Ohhh, it’s the Sparklett’s man.”

Later, she said, she came to feel similarly flattered when strangers recognized her as Aunt Martha. She even began to think of herself as an Aunt Martha, wondering once when she was cast astride a camel for another product’s commercial, “Would Aunt Martha be doing this?”

MacMillan began her acting career in Vancouver, working with the short-lived but historic Totem Theatre company, started by her future husband, Arngrim, and his partner, the late Stuart Baker. She got the job, she said years later, “because I could type.”

MacMillan did type, and pose for eye-catching publicity photographs, but she also acted and frequently was the leading lady. When the theater closed after three years, Baker announced both the demise and the pending marriage of MacMillan and Arngrim.

That was 1954, and the young couple, accompanied by Baker, took the train to Toronto. There, MacMillan talked CBC radio producer Andrew Allen into hiring her to do children’s voices.

“I started the morning doing school broadcasts and wound up at night doing dramatic things with disturbed children,” she told the Vancouver Sun two years ago.

When MacMillan and her husband moved to New York City, she used the tapes to win the Casper cartoon voice role. They came to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s as the television industry moved West. She did characters for “The Gumby Show,” Sweet Polly for “Underdog” and Kokette for the “Mean Moe” series.

In addition to MacMillan’s many cartoon, commercial and stage roles, she also voiced the tiny Caroline and John-John Kennedy, children of President John F. Kennedy, in the comic record, “The First Family.” Released in the early 1960s, when the Kennedys were beloved occupants of the White House and before the tragedies that befell them, the album was a top seller and the first to satirize a sitting president.

After MacMillan returned to Vancouver in the mid-1990s, she participated in Co-Op Radio’s Sunday program for senior citizens and served on the board of the 411 Seniors Centre.

MacMillan is survived by her husband, and their two children, actress Alison Arngrim, who for seven seasons was nasty Nellie Oleson on the television series “Little House on the Prairie,” and actor Stefan Arngrim, who portrayed Barry Lockridge on the television show “Land of the Giants.”