Mae Questel

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Mae Questel

Mae Questel (born September 13, 1908 in New York , † January 4, 1998 in New York ) was an American actress and voice actress .

Life

The artist from the New York Bronx started her acting career as a stage actress and played a. a. on New York Broadway in Vaudeville Theaters, where she v. a. Actresses like Marlene Dietrich and Fanny Brice and male colleagues like Rudy Vallee and Maurice Chevalier imitated and parodied.

With her voice, she would ultimately experience the climax of her career, although her name remained largely unknown. From the 1930s on, Questel lent her voice to the cartoon character Betty Boop . This character was so popular at the time that a version of Shirley Temple's The Good Ship Lollipop intoned by Mae Questel in her Betty Boop voice sold more than two million times. In 1988 she spoke again to Betty Boop in a supporting role in the film Wrong Game with Roger Rabbit . She also spoke to other well-known cartoon characters, e.g. B. Casper , the friendly ghost; and between 1933 and 1967 in a total of 450 episodes Popeye's friend Olive Oyl (in the German version Olivia Öl ).

While she demonstrated a great variety of voices in her “voice acting”, her acting appearances were often stereotypically based on the type of Jewish woman, often caricatured. So she played in 1959 on Broadway in A Majority of One as well as in the 1961 film adaptation. Woody Allen designed the role of the mother in his tragicomedy New York Stories based on the character from A Majority of One and also cast Questel. For his film Zelig, about a human chameleon, he even had her interpret the Betty Boop theme song Chameleon Days - at the same time a profound allusion to the main message of the film and a chance for Mae Questel to be the personified Betty Boop in words and pictures at the same time present.

Her last roles were in 1989 as the mother of Woody Allen in New York Stories and as a confused great-aunt in the Christmas film Schöne Bescherung . Mae Questel died on January 4, 1998 at the age of 89 from complications from her Alzheimer's disease .

Filmography (selection)

Selection of appearances in motion pictures; Cartoons are not included

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Michael Freedland: The voice of boop-oop-a-doop. In: The Guardian, November 16, 1998.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Questel, Mae
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actress and voice actress
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH January 4, 1998
Place of death new York