Christine Cavanaugh

Almost all my favourite episodes of The X-Files are funny ones. “Small Potatoes” is one of the funniest. It’s the story of a man whose life is small and sad and frustrating—he can change his physical appearance, but that’s about all he has going for him. He sleeps with a bunch of women in the guise of their husbands—and one in the guise of Luke Skywalker. That woman is played by Christine Cavanaugh in one of the rare live action roles she did. She is fantastic at it.

Mostly, it’s her voice that will be familiar. Chucky Finster. Dexter. For me, Gosalyn Waddlemeyer-Mallard. Babe, in the first movie. If your family was particularly weird, Birdie the Early Bird in a bunch of McDonaldland movies. If you’re a certain age, Christine Cavanaugh’s voice was inescapable during your childhood. I’m slightly too old for that, but I’m still extremely familiar with her output, even though I haven’t seen some of the shows she did that mean a lot to a lot of you.

Her natural voice was one that worked for prepubescent boys—there’s a certain appeal to making older women do those voices, because you don’t have to be afraid they’ll go through puberty. Cavanaugh was apparently so good at it that Dexter’s Laboratory creator Gennady Tartakovsky cites her death as one of the reasons he won’t reboot or continue the show, even though the character was voiced by Candi Milo for a season and a half, presumably after Cavanaugh retired from acting.

Why did Cavanaugh retire? Well you might ask. I found one source that used the old chestnut “to spend more time with her family,” but mostly it’s agreed that she didn’t talk about her reasons. She retired thirteen years before her death. It seems unlikely to me that she lived all those years with severe enough chronic myelogenous leukemia to cause her to walk away that early, but maybe not. The Wikipedia article is one of those written assuming a certain baseline medical knowledge that I frankly do not have, and reading WebMD or similar is unlikely to give me information about prognosis in 2003.

Actually, quite a lot of Cavanaugh’s life is mysterious. She seems to have been raised by her paternal grandmother for her first fifteen years, after which she was adopted—but why? There’s no information about her parents, and no one talks about them. She was married for three years, and reading between the lines and the fact that she was Mormon implies that she was a housewife. But of course that’s conjecture. What we know is that she never remarried and never had children. As I’ve said before, this sort of thing is actually none of our business, but it doesn’t stop us from wondering.