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Cree Summer, or Cree Summer Francks (born July 7, 1969) is an Canadian-American-Indian voice actress. Her father is famed Canadian actor Don Francks, and her mother is Lili Red Eagle, a member of the Plains Cree First Nation. She was born in Los Angeles, California, but grew up on an Indian reservation in Saskatchewan province in Canada.
Although she is mainly known for her voice talents, her first major break in show business was as a regular character on a live-action sitcom, A Different World, a spinoff of The Cosby Show, in the late 1980s. Also, although her first major voice acting role, Elmyra in Tiny Toon Adventures, was as a white kid, most of her subsequent roles have seen her play an African-American (Aka Pella in Histeria, Max Gibson in Batman Beyond, Susie Carmichael in Rugrats and its subsequent spinoff All Grown Up, No. 5 in Codename: Kids Next Door) or a tribeswoman (Kitana in the animated series based on Mortal Kombat, Kida in the movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire). Her distinctive "trick voice" is quite recognizable (sounding somewhat like a girl with a seriously sore throat), although she has been known to voice characters without using that trick voice (for example, Max Gibson and Kida).
Besides voice acting, she has also diversified into singing: she was also the lead singer in a rock group, "Subject To Change", which gigged and toured with other bands in the 1990s. Her latest musical effort, a solo album entitled Street Faërie, was released on Sony's Epic Records label in April 1999. Also, Summer's passion for singing seems to have been incorporated into her Susie character in All Grown Up!, as she has been imaged as "a singer with real talent" [1].
