Gale Sondergaard

Gale Sondergaard, born Edith Holm Sondergaard on February 15, 1899, in Litchfield, Minnesota, was an American actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television across more than five decades. The daughter of Danish immigrants Hans Sondergaard and Anna Kirstine Søndergaard, she grew up in a household with academic roots — her father taught at the University of Minnesota, where she studied drama. She went on to train at the Minneapolis School of Dramatic Arts before joining the John Keller Shakespeare Company, with which she toured North America in productions of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth. Her association with the Theatre Guild brought her to the New York stage, where she would appear on Broadway from 1928 to 1980, taking roles in productions including Strange Interlude, Doctor Monica, Faust, and Goodbye Fidel.

Sondergaard made her film debut in Anthony Adverse in 1936, playing the scheming Faith Paleologus, and became the first recipient of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for that performance. Her screen career flourished through the late 1930s and 1940s, with supporting roles in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), The Cat and the Canary (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940), and The Letter (1940), in which she played the exotic, sinister Eurasian wife opposite Bette Davis. During pre-production of The Wizard of Oz (1939), she was cast and photographed in wardrobe tests for the role of the Wicked Witch of the West, which was then conceived as a glamorous villainess. When the production shifted toward a more conventionally frightening portrayal, Sondergaard withdrew, and the role went to Margaret Hamilton. She subsequently appeared as the magically humanized cat Tylette in The Blue Bird (1940) and had a supporting role in The Spider Woman (1943) and its non-canonical follow-up The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946), both for Universal. Her performance as the king's principal wife in Anna and the King of Siam (1946) earned her a second Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Her film career came to an abrupt halt around 1949 as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. Her husband, director Herbert Biberman, whom she had married on May 15, 1930, in Philadelphia, was accused of communist sympathies and imprisoned as one of the Hollywood Ten in the early 1950s. Sondergaard stood by him during that period and supported his work on Salt of the Earth (1954). Following the completion of that film, the couple sold their Hollywood home and relocated to New York City, where Sondergaard returned to theater work. She and Biberman adopted two children, Joan Kirstine Biberman and Daniel Hans Biberman. Biberman died in 1971. Prior to her marriage to Biberman, Sondergaard had been married to actor Neill O'Malley from 1922 until their divorce in 1930.

In 1969, Sondergaard appeared in an off-Broadway one-woman show titled Woman and began resuming work in film and television, having moved back to Los Angeles. Her revived career extended into the early 1980s. Her younger sister, Hester Sondergaard, was also an actress, appearing in Seeds of Freedom (1943), The Naked City (1948), Jigsaw (1949), and The Big Break (1953). Following several strokes, Sondergaard was admitted to the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, in 1982. She died there on August 14, 1985, from cerebrovascular thrombosis, at the age of 86.