You probably wouldn’t have recognized her face. But the voice? That’s a different story.
Jean Vander Pyl, who gave life to Wilma Flintstone and dozens of other radio and cartoon characters, died on Saturday. She was 79.
Ms. Vander Pyl was the last of the original cast of the Flintstones. The animated show about family foibles in the Stone Age was a prime-time hit from 1960 to 1966. The original episodes have run in syndication ever since.
“She was an anonymous celebrity,” said Michael O’Meara, one of her three sons. “You could go out with her and nobody would recognize her.
“All she’d have to do was go ‘Fr-ed!’ and people would say: ‘Wilma Flintstone! I grew up with you!’ She’d light up the room.”
For O’Meara, it is comforting to think that his mother’s voice is close to eternal now.
“She’s going to live on, and kids who aren’t even born yet are going to know Wilma Flintstone,” said O’Meara, who lived with his mother in recent years. “And I’ll be able to tell those kids that she was my mother.”
Ms. Vander Pyl always said she felt a kinship with Wilma Flintstone.
“She’s got guts, Wilma has,” she once said. “And I think I do, too.”
Ms. Vander Pyl died of lung cancer, O’Meara said. Before she became ill, she had wanted to do a television commercial as Wilma warning children not to start smoking.
“Everybody on the Flintstones smoked and all of them ended up dying of smoking-related diseases,” O’Meara said. “That little, cute laugh that Betty and Wilma did with their mouths closed? They came up with that because when they normally laughed, because they were smokers, they coughed.”
Ms. Vander Pyl lived in San Clemente for 25 years before moving to Dana Point two years ago. She continued to work — in addition to Wilma, she was well-known as Rosie the Robot and Mrs. Spacely from The Jetsons — until six months ago.
