Bernice Hansen

{{Infobox person

| name = Bernice Hansen

| birth_name = Berneice Edna Hansell

| birth_date = {{birth_date|1897|7|11}}

| birth_place = Los Angeles, California, U.S.

| death_date = {{death_date and age|1981|4|16|1897|7|11}}

| death_place = Los Angeles, California, U.S.

| occupation = Voice actress

| years_active = 1934–1942

}}

Berneice Edna Hansell (July 11, 1897 – April 16, 1981), known as Bernice Hansen, was an American voice actress. She was best known for providing the voices for both female and young male characters in the mid to late 1930s for various cartoon studios, most notably Warner Bros. Cartoons, where she played Little Kitty in I Haven't Got a Hat (1935).

Because of a lack of on-screen voice credits on cartoons throughout the 1930s, identifying many actors has been a challenge to historians, resulting in incorrect guesses, especially with many female voices portraying young animals that sound very similar. She has, for example, been incorrectly identified as providing the voice of Sniffles.[http://www.i-foo.com/~eocostello/wbcc/eowbcc-s.html#sniffles Costello, E.O., "Sniffles" entry at The Warner Bros. Cartoon Companion. Accessed 2008-05-13] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110712234011/http://www.i-foo.com/~eocostello/wbcc/eowbcc-s.html#sniffles |date=July 12, 2011 }}

Early life and career

Hansell was born in Los Angeles, California on July 11, 1897California Death Records to Edward and T. Belle (Carey) Hansell.U.S. Census reports, 1900-1930 Her father was an Englishman who arrived in the United States in 1877. Her mother was from Iowa. Edward Hansell worked as a jeweller and then an optician during the 1920s, and as an elevator operator during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Hansell found work as a stenographer and then as a dressmaker on the Warner Bros. lot.Leon Schlesinger interview, Baltimore Sun, June 20, 1937, from the Ledger Syndicate She managed to find work in cartoons at the Walt Disney Studios and provided squeaks for Mickey Mouse.United Press story, Dec. 13, 1934 That same year, she found work in the Leon Schlesinger Productions and Walter Lantz Productions.

Her animation career ended in the early 1940s. By this point, the small, "cutesy" style characters that had been popular in the 1930s (in which Hansen had specialized) were falling out of fashion; Sara Berner, who had a reputation as a more dynamic performer and skilled impersonator, succeeded Hansen as Warner Bros.' primary female vocalist for much of the 1940s.