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Gale Sondergaard (February 15, 1899 - August 13,
1985) was a United States|US film actor|actress.

Born Edith Holm Sondergaard in Litchfield,
Minnesota to Denmark|Danish parents, Sondergaard
began her acting career in the theater. She made
her first film appearance in Anthony Adverse
(1936) and became the first recipient of the
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this
performance.

Her career as a supporting actress flourished
during the 1930s.

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

In 1940 she played a role which would become one
of her most identifiable, as the exotic and
sinister wife in The Letter (1940 movie)|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.

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 communism|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. They
sold their home in Hollywood and moved to New
York, where there was apparently no blacklist, and
pursued a career on stage.

Biberman died in 1971, and Sondergaard made a few
more film and television appearances, before dying
from cerebral vascular thrombosis in Woodland
Hills, California at the age of 86.


==External links==
*imdb name|id= 0814216|name= Gale Sondergaard
*ibdb name|id= 60564|name= Gale Sondergaard