Gale Sondergaard

 Gale Sondergaard was one of the main inspirations for the look of the Evil Queen/Witch in Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937) and was going to play the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), but instead of making the witch similar to Snow White's beautiful but wicked queen, as was originally planned, it was decided the witch should be ugly. Sondergaard then refused the role.

In 1936, Sondergaard and Maria Ouspenskaya became the first two actresses (of more than 50) to receive an Oscar nomination for their feature film debut. She was nominated (and won) the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for "Anthony Adverse" (Ouspenskaya was nominated for "Dodsworth").

"My parents were both progressive people learning much from Henrik Ibsen. My mother believed that a woman should not be tied down to family with nothing else in her life. They were also progressive politically. My father, we thought, voted the Democratic ticket, but actually he voted the Socialist ticket; my mother was a suffragette and I marched in parades with her."

After Sondergaard was blacklisted in 1947, director Mervyn LeRoy, who had given her her first break in "Anthony Adverse," cast her in a supporting role as Barbara Stanwyck's mother in "East Side, West Side," in order to test industry reaction. The negative response to her appearance completed the blacklisting, and she didn't appear in another major Hollywood film film for 28 years.