Russi Taylor

Russi Taylor voiced Minnie Mouse for thirty-three years, from 1986 until her death in 2019, longer than anyone else has held the part. In 1991 she married Wayne Allwine, who was by then the voice of Mickey; he died in 2009. It is a piece of Disney trivia repeated so often that it obscures how much other work she did.

The range is the point. She was a character voice rather than a leading-lady voice: her Minnie is bright and clipped, but she was just as likely to be a nasal boy, a fussy old woman, or several small ducks at once. On DuckTales she played Huey, Dewey and Louie, and Webby too in the feature film, which means a good number of that show's arguments are her arguing with herself. On The Simpsons she was Martin Prince, Uter, and Sherri and Terri, so most of Springfield Elementary's speaking student body came out of one throat.

Her filmography reads as a map of American animation between 1980 and 2015 rather than a career with a shape: Baby Gonzo on Muppet Babies, Pebbles in the later Flintstones specials, a ghost girl in a Scooby-Doo film, the Fairy Godmother across two Cinderella sequels, and small live-action jobs whenever an animal needed a voice, including the cat in Babe and a poodle in its sequel. Disney kept her closest. She is Minnie opposite Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in the Mickey shorts of the 2010s, and in Get a Horse!, which drops a 1920s black and white cartoon into a modern cinema and gave her both versions of the same character at once.