Mona Marshall, the South Park voice actress who dubs over Trey Parker

Mona Marshall

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	August 31, 1947 Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation	Voice actress
Known for	Inside Out, Monsters, Inc., Tangled

On South Park, the order of work sometimes runs backwards. The show is made in days rather than months, so Trey Parker often records the lines of Sheila Broflovski or Linda Stotch himself, the animators start drawing to his voice, and only then does Mona Marshall step into the booth and replace him, fitting her performance to mouths that are already moving. She has said it is no different from dubbing an anime. That detail explains her whole career: an actress whose craft is arriving second and making the result sound as if it came first.

She did not set out to be a voice at all. Marshall trained in classical theatre and came to Hollywood to be a serious actress, auditioning for every musical going and never quite fitting the type. To pay the rent she waited tables and taught a fifth-grade class at Hollywood Professional School. One of her pupils was studying with Daws Butler, the man behind Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, and the boy’s mother kept nagging her to sign up for Butler’s voice-over workshop. When she finally did, she told Otaku USA, her whole acting world opened up, because she could be anything. Only later did she connect the teacher with the cartoon she and her sister watched every Saturday morning as girls, Ruff and Reddy, in which Butler voiced the dog.

She knocked on doors and brought homemade cookies to directors and producers at Hanna-Barbera so they would remember who she was, and the first payoff was a run of guest spots on The Smurfs. Before that she had toured as a hand-puppet performer with The LA Moving Van And Puppet Company, which turned out to be accidental training: when you talk as the puppet, your hand moves in sync. The 1980s filled up with television animation, including Mokey Fraggle in Fraggle Rock: The Animated Series, characters across CBS Storybreak and Betty Brant in the 1981 Spider-Man, alongside on-camera spots in Cheers and Who’s the Boss?

Her first anime job came through the director Wally Burr, who cast her as a little girl in the English version of Space Pirate Captain Harlock at a time when she had no idea what anime was. There were no beeps to cue the take and no Pro Tools to nudge a line into place, so the sync had to be right on the first pass. She was good at it, and she credits two things: the timing of a singer-songwriter and her years with the puppets. That skill carried her through decades of dubbing, very often as boys. She was Izzy Izumi, the laptop-hugging know-it-all of Digimon Adventure and still her favourite; Toboe in Wolf’s Rain; a one-episode child in Cowboy Bebop who was really hundreds of years old and hauntingly evil; Inari and the young Haku in Naruto; and Kite, the hero of the .hack games on PlayStation 2. She was also among the English voices of Spirited Away, and has said that being part of the Miyazaki films is one of the things she loved most.

The role most people know her for arrived through a loss. Mary Kay Bergman, who had voiced nearly every woman in South Park since its first season, died in late 1999, and Marshall took over Sheila Broflovski, Kyle’s mother and the town’s most combustible campaigner, together with Linda Stotch, the mother of Butters. By her own count she now plays about half the women in the town, and she has carried them into the video games South Park: The Stick of Truth and South Park: The Fractured but Whole and into the feature-length specials of recent years, among them South Park: The End of Obesity in 2024.

The usual way of telling voice-acting history hands the credit to whoever spoke first. Sheila was Bergman’s creation; Doraemon belongs, in Japan, to the actresses who voiced him there; every anime boy Marshall played existed in Japanese before she reached him. Read that way, her career is a long series of second versions. The arithmetic says something else. Bergman voiced Sheila for a little over two years, while Marshall has held the part for more than a quarter of a century and several hundred episodes, which means that for most people who have ever watched the show, Sheila’s voice is hers. The replacement became the original. The industry’s habit of filing her under “additional voices” in features such as Monsters, Inc., Frozen and Inside Out undersells how much of American animation passes through performers heard by millions and recognised by almost no one.

In 2014 she took the part she calls one of her very favourites anywhere: the title character in the English dub of Doraemon, produced by Bang Zoom! and launched on Disney XD with a 26-episode run, in a version that renamed the children around him for American viewers, so that Nobita became Noby and Shizuka became Sue. Marshall describes him as her “slightly crazy, funny and wacky, blue robotic cat from the future.”

At seventy-nine she is still booking roles. In 2024 she voiced Shuichi’s mother in the English dub of Uzumaki, the Junji Ito horror adaptation shown on Adult Swim. This year she is among the additional voices of Pixar’s Toy Story 5, released in June, and she plays Yoshino in the English dub of Akane-banashi on Netflix, a series about rakugo, the Japanese art in which a single storyteller performs every character. It is a fitting assignment for someone who has spent a career being a whole cast by herself. South Park, meanwhile, is back with new episodes this autumn, and Sheila is still hers.

Two other lives have run alongside the booth. As a singer-songwriter she worked clubs from the 1970s, first with Cole Porter and Gershwin and then with her own songs, which she shaped into a solo show, Life is a Celebration . . . Potholes & All, staged in North Hollywood in 1993. She also teaches: her YouTube channel, Voices for Fun, offers two-minute lessons in using the voice structurally, the way she was trained in theatre, sometimes delivered in character as Kyle’s or Butters’ mom. In July 2023 she shared that Sal Iannotti, her husband of 37 years, had died suddenly.

Decades after Daws Butler’s workshop, the pipeline that first hired her to replace Japanese voices now runs through Netflix, and South Park keeps writing Sheila new things to shout about. For an actress whose job has always been to arrive second and sound first, the queue of characters waiting for her voice is still long.

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Tags: actors, anime, South Park, Trey Parker, voice actresses, Digimon Adventure, Mona Marshall

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