Actors - Gale Sondergaard

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Gale Sondergaard

	Actors - Gale Sondergaard

Gale Sondergaard (February 15 1899–August 14 1985) was a U.S. film actress. In 1936, she was the first actress to ever be awarded a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award.

Early life

Edith Holm Sondergaard was born in Litchfield, Minnesota on February 15, 1899 to Danish parents. She studied acting at the Minneapolis School of Dramatic Arts before joining the John Keller Shakespeare Company. She later toured North America in productions of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice
, and Macbeth.

Career

Sondergaard made her first film appearance in Anthony Adverse
as "Faith Paleologue" and became the first recipient of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this performance. Her career as an actress flourished during the 1930s, including a role opposite Paul Muni in Academy Award-winning The Life of Emile Zola.

Walt Disney Studios used her as the main inspiration for the Wicked Queen in the animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937). Originally cast as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939), she was replaced by Margaret Hamilton. MGM had decided to change the Wicked Witch from a glamorous character to an ugly one and Sondergaard refused to wear uglifying makeup.

In 1940 she played a role which would become one of her most identifiable, as the exotic and sinister wife in The Letter, who kills murderess Bette Davis. She received a second Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her role in Anna and the King of Siam
in 1946.

Private life

Married to the film director Herbert J. Biberman from 1930, her career suffered irreparable damage during the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when her husband was accused of being a communist and named as one of the Hollywood Ten. With her career stalled, she supported her husband during the production of Salt of the Earth
(1954). Highly controversial when it was made, and not a commercial success, its artistic and cultural merit was recognised in 1992 when the National Film Preservation Board selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Sondergaard and Biberman sold their home in Hollywood shortly after they completed Salt of the Earth, and moved to New York where Sondergaard was able to work in theatre. Biberman died in 1971, and Sondergaard made a few more film and television appearances, before dying from cerebral vascular thrombosis (stroke) in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 86.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Gale Sondergaard ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Gale Sondergaard; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay