Dawn Greenhalgh, Babar’s Queen Celeste, Dies at 93. She Found the Stage as a Child in a Wartime Prison Camp

Dawn Greenhalgh, the Canadian actress who gave Queen Celeste her voice in the animated Babar, has died at 93. She played the queen of Celesteville in the original series from 1989 and came back to the role in the computer-animated sequel more than twenty years later. Before any of that, she’d been a child in a wartime prison camp in Shanghai and one of the young actors in the Stratford Festival’s very first season.

Greenhalgh died on 6 November at her home in Toronto, her family announced. The Hollywood Reporter carried the news on Friday. She’s survived by four children, all of whom followed her into acting, writing or directing, among them the actress Megan Follows.

For millions of children she was simply Celeste. Babar, made by Nelvana with CBC and based on the books by the French writer and illustrator Jean de Brunhoff, ran from 1989 to 1991 with Gordon Pinsent as King Babar. It aired on HBO in the United States and, according to The Hollywood Reporter, in more than 150 other countries. On the official Babar channel the end credits still read the same way they did in 1990: Queen Celeste, Dawn Greenhalgh.

Her Celeste was warm and unhurried, a queen who mostly spoke as a wife and a mother. In the clip below the scene opens late at night, with Celeste beside Babar and worried about their baby daughter Isabelle.

Hear the voice: Dawn Greenhalgh as Queen Celeste in The Celesteville Enquirer (1990). Her first line comes a few seconds in. Video: the official Babar channel, on YouTube

Two series, one queen

Babar was a gentle show, built on family stories, small mistakes and putting things right. A part like Celeste asks for warmth without sugar, and authority without raising the voice. That’s harder than it sounds, and Greenhalgh brought decades of stage training to it.

Queen Celeste with King Babar. Image: Babar official channel, on YouTube

Then, in 2010, the family came back. Babar and the Adventures of Badou was computer-animated and centred on Babar’s grandson, Badou. Greenhalgh returned as Celeste in 2010 and 2011, and Pinsent came back as Babar too. The look of Celesteville had changed completely. The queen’s voice hadn’t.

Celeste and Babar in Babar and the Adventures of Badou. Image: Babar and the Adventures of Badou official channel, on YouTube

That’s rarer than it sounds. Animation revivals often recast, sometimes because the original actor isn’t available and sometimes because a studio wants a new sound. Bringing Greenhalgh back meant parents who’d grown up with Babar heard the same Celeste they remembered, now talking to a new generation.

A stage found in a prison camp

Hazel Dawn Greenhalgh was born in Shanghai on 25 September 1933 to British parents, Elizabeth and Laurence. During the Japanese occupation of the city, she and her family were held in a prison camp. Her family said that’s where she found what she’d spend her life doing.

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In the words of her family: “It was there she discovered that in the midst of such abject misery, her love of music, theater and dance could offer happiness, purpose and temporary respite, both to herself and to her audience.”

At 14 she came to Canada with only her guardian, Albert Mah, and went to Montreal High School, where she started the school newspaper and became its first editor. Five years later she was on the stage at Stratford, Ontario.

The Stratford Festival opened on 13 July 1953 in a large tent, with Alec Guinness as its star. When TVO looked back at that first season, it noted that the founders had “brought in up-and-coming domestic talent such as Lloyd Bochner, Dawn Greenhalgh, Don Harron.” She went on to be a founding member of the Neptune Theatre in Halifax and of Theatre Plus in Toronto, studied in New York with Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof and Mira Rostova, and played theatres from Manhattan to London’s West End.

A screen career, and a family one

On television she was a regular on the soap Strange Paradise in 1969 and 1970. She was nominated for an ACTRA award in 1973 and for a Gemini Award in 2005, for a guest role in This Is Wonderland. In the 1985 Anne of Green Gables miniseries, which drew huge audiences in Canada, she played Mrs. Cadbury opposite her daughter Megan as Anne. Her films included Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, where she played the agent of Julianne Moore’s character.

She was married to the actor Ted Follows from 1958 until 1979, and acting became the family trade. The Follows family played a three-episode story together on The Littlest Hobo in 1982, and in 2001 they staged Noël Coward’s Hay Fever in Gravenhurst, Ontario, a production that toured southern Ontario two years later. She’s survived by her daughters Megan Follows and Samantha Follows, both actresses, and Edwina Follows, a screenwriter and producer; her son Laurence Follows; and her grandchildren Lyla, Aaron, Russell, Samuel, Mikayla and Rowan.

What her Celeste tells voice actors

Greenhalgh came to Babar in her mid fifties, after more than three decades on stage and screen. She didn’t start out as a voice actor, and she didn’t need to. Everything Celeste needed, the timing, the listening, the ability to make a short line land, came from the theatre.

Her career is also a reminder of how long a voice role can live. The original Babar episodes are still on YouTube, still watched by children who weren’t born when they were made, and still carrying her name in the credits. A role she first played in 1989 has now outlived the actress herself.

For a lot of people who grew up with Babar, Queen Celeste was one of the first calm grown-up voices they heard on television. That voice belonged to Dawn Greenhalgh.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter (family announcement); TVO, on the Stratford Festival’s first season; Wikipedia; end credits of Babar, The Celesteville Enquirer, on the official Babar YouTube channel. Images: the official Babar and Babar and the Adventures of Badou channels, on YouTube.

Lee este artículo en español: Muere Dawn Greenhalgh, la reina Celeste de Babar, a los 93 años. Descubrió el escenario de niña en un campo de prisioneros

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