The sweetest little old lady on the planet, until the door closes. Tress MacNeille has spent more than thirty years voicing the characters nobody notices and a few that everybody does, and the best of them, Mom on Futurama, is a complete joke in one voice.
Fi1m perspective
Mom in Futurama (1999) comes into a room in a quaver, and everyone in it trusts her. The door shuts, the voice drops and the swearing starts. Tress MacNeille plays both halves, and what made us laugh every time is that there is no change of gear between them: the quaver goes before the smile does, because there was never a sweet old lady, only an industrialist who finds one useful. It is the show's whole view of business in a single character, and it is told faster than any speech could manage.
She came up through radio and ten years with The Groundlings, which is where the speed comes from, and her regular parts arrived at the end of the 1980s: Chip and Gadget on Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (1989), then Babs Bunny on Tiny Toon Adventures (1990), a mimic who did Hepburn, Bette Davis and Cher because MacNeille could, and Dot Warner on Animaniacs (1993). The Simpsons took her on in 1990 and has never let her go. Agnes Skinner, Lindsey Naegle, the Crazy Cat Lady and Brandine Spuckler are all her, and so, from 1999, is Daisy Duck. Most working actors have a type. MacNeille has about six, and they are mostly old women, small boys and people in charge.
She is a background player by trade, and the trade is harder than it looks. Five or six actors have to sound like a town, and the fourth voice in a scene has to be as particular as the first without pulling the scene towards it. She has done this across decades of ensembles, often alongside Maurice LaMarche and Rob Paulsen and under the voice director Andrea Romano, and her own account of the method is plain enough: "The characters that I do all come from people in my own life". You can hear it. Her old women are not cartoon old women; they are somebody's aunt, with a particular grievance.
The cost of being the useful one is that she is rarely the point. In The Simpsons Movie (2007) she is credited thirteen times, from a pig to a cat lady to a girl on the phone, and the one part with a name and a thread, Lisa's boy Colin, is written with more affection than wit; she gives him a shyness the script does not do anything with. Nothing in the film is her fault and nothing in it is hers either. That is the job, and she has done it for longer than most of the people writing for her.
If you want to hear what she can do, put on an early Futurama and wait for Mom's office door to close. The sweet old lady is a good performance of a woman performing one.
Biography
Tress MacNeille is an American voice actress. Born Teressa Claire Payne on 20 June 1951 in Chicago, Illinois, she began her career in the late 1970s with roles in animated series such as Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo.
She is known for voicing Mom on the series Futurama (1999–), as well as numerous characters on The Simpsons (1989–) including Agnes Skinner, the Crazy Cat Lady and Lindsey Naegle. Other notable roles include Dot Warner on Animaniacs (1993–1998 and revival) and Babs Bunny on Tiny Toon Adventures (1990–1992). She has also voiced Daisy Duck in Disney media since 1999.
MacNeille spent ten years as a member of the improvisational comedy group The Groundlings. She has contributed voices to films including The Simpsons Movie (2007) and Bee Movie (2007).
