Hansell was born in
Los Angeles, California on July 11, 1897 to Edward and T. Belle (Carey) Hansell. Her father was an
Englishman who arrived in the
United States in 1877. Her mother was from Iowa. Edward Hansell worked as a jeweller and then an optician during the 1920s, and as an elevator operator during the
Great Depression of the 1930s. Hansell found work as a
stenographer and then as a
dressmaker on the Warner Bros. lot. She managed to find work in cartoons at the
Walt Disney Studios and provided squeaks for
Mickey Mouse. That same year, she found work in the
Leon Schlesinger Productions and
Walter Lantz Productions. Her animation career ended in the early 1940s. By this point, the small, "cutesy" style characters that had been popular in the 1930s (in which Hansen had specialized) were falling out of fashion;
Sara Berner, who had a reputation as a more dynamic performer and skilled impersonator, succeeded Hansen as Warner Bros.' primary female vocalist for much of the 1940s. Because of a lack of on-screen voice credits on cartoons throughout the 1930s, identifying many actors has been a challenge to historians, resulting in incorrect guesses, especially with many female voices portraying young animals that sound very similar. She has, for example, been incorrectly identified as providing the voice of
Sniffles. ==Death==