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Lucille Bliss auditioned for Hanna-Barbera for 15 years before landing Smurfette
It was a long road to Smurf Village!
Guess what? We've got a fever, and the only prescription is more Smurfs history! Today, we will learn about Lucille Bliss' long journey to becoming Smurfette. Co-creator of The Smurfs, Joe Barbera, wrote in his memoir My Life in Toons, "Perhaps the only Smurf more popular than (Papa Smurf) is Smurfette... And key to her success was a woman named Lucille Bliss, who gave her a voice."
Lucille Bliss' career, like many voice actors, was full of twists and turns. She worked on radio shows, hosted her own local children's television show, and produced talent shows for military service members at the Embarcadero Armed Services YMCA, all while auditioning for cartoon roles. She had gotten guest roles on a few cartoons, and even voiced Anastasia Tremaine in Disney's Cinderella, but she had a hard time getting regular work in voice acting.
According to Barbera, "Lucille had been coming to the studio regularly for maybe fifteen years, auditioning for voices. Unfortunately, we were never able to use her." Hanna and Barbera's feelings towards Bliss were sincere; they liked her and recognized her talents, but it was hard to place her slightly raspy voice in a cartoon. Bliss had very nearly played Elroy Jetson, but the network wanted a boy to voice Elroy. Hanna-Barbera even tried getting Bliss to go by a pseudonym - Lou Bliss - to trick the network into thinking she was a boy, but Bliss' representatives refused to let her be credited by anything other than her real name. The role went to Daws Butler instead.
Time went on and in 1980, Hanna-Barbera was developing Peyo's Smurfs into a one-hour cartoon show. Barbera recalled, "Then we came up with the character for Smurfette, Lucille showed up for an audition, and she was absolutely perfect for the part. You could not have dreamed up the voice any better." In an interview with the Television Academy, Bliss recalled the audition as more of an interview where she answered questions like "What kind of person do you think Smurfette would be?" and she was given scenarios to act out Smurfette's reaction.
Bliss got a callback and amidst her excitement, her agent tried to bring her back down to Earth, saying, "There's only one female character in it so don't hold your breath." It's true, she was competing with June Foray and other more experienced voice actors, but Bliss refused to give up because she believed in Smurfette. Two auditions later, she got a call from Hanna-Barbera. She got Smurfette.
From her first line, Barbera knew Bliss's Smurfette was destined to be a hit. "When she appears among (the Smurfs), one of her very first lines is: 'Do you like what you see?' It was a line Lucille delivered with a husky coyness and allure that worked beautifully, and it was from the moment of her introduction that the show really took off."
