‘Spider-Man’ and ‘G.I. Joe’ Star Dies Unexpectedly: Morgan Lofting Was 84

Morgan Lofting, best known for her voice work in animated series and movies like G.I. Joe and Spider-Man, has died. The veteran voice actress passed away “unexpectedly” at her home in Burbank, California, her agents Nery Lemus and Christopher Arsaga of CelebWorx confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. A cause of death was not revealed. She was 84.

“As one of the 10 founding actors at our agency, she meant the world to us and our company,” they said in a statement.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 2, 1940, Lofting began her voice acting career in the late ‘70s when she played Princess Invidia on Star Blazers, an American adaptation of the Japanese anime television series Space Battleship Yamato. She voiced the character across 26 episodes between 1979 and 1984, per her IMDb profile. It was around the same time that she began voicing Aunt May and the Black Cat for the 1981-1982 Spider-Man series.

Lofting, however, is best remembered for her portrayal of Cobra’s chief intelligence officer the Baroness in several G.I. Joe series and films in the 1980s and early ’90s. Lofting came up with a European accent for the character, which she voiced in the 1983 miniseries G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero – The M.A.S.S. Device, the 1984 miniseries G.I. Joe: The Revenge of Cobra, the 1985 series G.I. Joe, 1986’s TV movie G.I. Joe: Arise, Serpentor, Arise!, 1987’s direct-to-video G.I. Joe: The Movie, the 1989 miniseries G.I. Joe: Operation Dragonfire, and a G.I. Joe series that ran from 1990 to 1991.

“You’re handed generally a sketch — like a black-and-white sketch of what [the character is] gonna look like, which is extremely helpful — and there was probably a character background, and they must have said something about an accent,” Lofting told Creative Continuity in 2016. “But you read this, and you start to get ideas, and then you go somewhere out in the field somewhere, and you work on your voice because you don’t want other actors to hear what you’re intending to do. And somehow I came up with this mid-European sound. I have no idea where this came from. There is no country where anybody speaks like this.”

Lofting’s other voice acting credits include portraying Moonracer and Firestar 1985 Transformers series, providing additional voices on the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring Total Recall in 1990, voicing Tunnel Rat’s Mother in 1996’s Quack Pack, and most recently, playing several characters in Ben 10: Omniverse from 2013 until 2014.

Lofting also did some live-action acting and appeared in the 1988 film The Night Before with Keanu Reeves and Lori Loughlin, an episode of Hotel, and four episodes of Knots Landing.

Lofting eventually returned to college in 1989 and earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in history at Cal State Northridge. She went on to become a librarian and started “bartending with books.”

The voice star is survived by her brother, Tim, his wife, Lynn, and their son, Brian; her son, Justin, and his wife, Stacie; and her grandchildren, Zac and Ellie.