Mary Kay Bergman

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.

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...".

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:

Dino Andrade established the Mary Kay Bergman Memorial Fund, which contributes to operation of the Suicide Prevention Center at the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center. 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. 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.

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

Bergman was married to voice actor Dino Andrade before her suicide in November 1999. Shortly after her death, Andrade established the Mary Kay Bergman Memorial Fund.

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.

On the morning of November 11, 1999, Bergman contributed to a radio program celebrating Disneyland's 45th anniversary. She was last seen alive at 9 p.m. PST, while she was talking to her friend on the phone. An hour and 20 minutes later, her husband and his friend, John Bell, returned home to find that she had fatally shot herself with a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun. A police officer pronounced her dead at 10:18 p.m. PST.

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.

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.

In 1994, Bergman started teaching the technique of doing voice-overs for animation at the Kalmenson and Kalmenson Studios in Burbank, California. 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.

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. 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.

Bergman married voice actor Dino Andrade on April 7, 1990. They remained married until Bergman's death in November 1999.

Born in Los Angeles, she had an interest in fantasy and animation early in her life. She acted in plays during high school and also studied theater at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After struggling to secure on-screen acting jobs, she began taking work as a voice-over actress. In 1989, she began voicing the Disney character Snow White. In the 1990s, she voiced Daphne Blake in three films from the Scooby Doo franchise.

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, and a few more radio spots in 1989, Bergman was not making enough to earn a living, so she worked part-time at Robinsons department store. During this time, she got the role with Disney as the voice of Snow White on tape, replacing Adriana Caselotti. She told her boss she needed the day off for the recording, but he refused and she left the post.

Bergman attended Le Conte Middle School and Hollywood High School, graduating in June 1978 with top academic honors. Following in the steps of one of her idols, Carol Burnett, Bergman attended University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and studied theater arts from 1978 until 1981. She was a classmate and friend of future The Simpsons voice actress Nancy Cartwright.

Mary Kay Bergman (June 5, 1961 – November 11, 1999), initially credited as Shannen Cassidy, was an American voice actress and voice-over teacher. Bergman was the lead female voice actress on South Park from the show's 1997 debut until her death. Throughout her career, Bergman performed voice work for over 400 television commercials and voiced over 100 cartoon, film, and video game characters.

Mary Kay Bergman was born on June 5, 1961, in Los Angeles. She was the only child of musicians David "Dave" Bergman and Patricia Paris "Pat" McGowan. She grew up around the corner from the home of Adriana Caselotti, the original voice of Snow White.

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.