"Sexy and sinister" are a fine qualities for any horror film femme fatale, and the unmatched Gale Sondergaard had them in abundance.  She seemed to effortlessly manipulate men, disarm woman, and work many a wicked wile on the silver screen.  Of course, she was a fine actress who may well have left this world with a few Oscars to her credit had not Hollywood quickly typecast her and the Hollywood Blacklist scuttled her career.  But at least we do have her classic horror film performances and they easily earn the coveted Renfield every time.  That's why we here at HORROR-WOOD have only...

By JOE WINTERS

No journey through the world of mystery and fright films would be complete without encountering a certain dark-haired beauty. With a gleam in her eyes, a killer smile, and razor-sharp articulation, Gale Sondergaard in many ways defined the screen’s classic femme fatale.

She was born Edith Holm Sondergaard on February 15, 1899 in Litchfield, Minnesota. Her father was a professor at the University of Minnesota, from which his daughter graduated. She joined an acting stock company and went on to link up with New York’s renowned Theatre Guild.

Divorced from her first husband, she married fellow Theatre Guild alumnus Herbert Biberman in 1930, and the two went to Hollywood in 1935. While Herbert wrote and directed films, Gale, at age 36, landed her first film role, that of the scheming Faith, in director Mervyn LeRoy’s Anthony Adverse (Warner Bros., 1936). For her efforts, she won the first Academy Award in the newly-established Best Supporting Actress category. The role would set the tone for many such roles to follow.

Another Sondergaard specialty would establish itself in Paramount’s 1939 comedy-thriller The Cat And The Canary. As Miss Lu, the housekeeper who hears voices from beyond, Gale helps supply the chills ("There are spirits all around you.") while Bob Hope delivers the chuckles ("Would you put some in a glass with a little ice?").

When the family lawyer (George Zucco) winds up dead, the other guests on the bayou island are suspect. While obviously a red herring suspect, Miss Lu becomes the hero when she discharges a shotgun into the killer before pretty Paulette Goddard can become the next victim.

Around this time, Gale was cast in the part of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard Of Oz. Sweeping false eyelashes arched penciled eyebrows, glossy lipstick, and black sequined hat and dress seemed inspired by the evil Queen in Snow White and was soon deemed too glamorous for the role of the OZ Witch.

A second test scrapped the beauty and substituted a scraggly wig and bulbous nose. Sondergaard and Mervyn LeRoy agreed this was not how the actress should be represented on screen, so by mutual agreement, Gale was released from the film.

A bit of a consolation prize was a role in The Blue Bird (Twentieth Century Fox, 1940). This Technicolor fantasy, like Oz, begins in black and white. A selfish little girl (Shirley Temple) and her younger brother (Johnny Russell) go in search of the legendary Bluebird of Happiness.

Accompanying them in human form are the family dog Tylo (Eddie Collins) and Tylette the cat (Sondergaard). Looking finely feline, she leads her companions into a series of misfortunes, only to wind up on the receiving end of one.

Also in 1940, Gale was among the cast of The Letter at Warner’s. As the Eurasian wife of a murdered man, she orchestrates a fitting revenge on the murderess (friend Bette Davis). Dressed in shimmering spangles and form-fitting gown, Mrs. Hammond (Sondergaard) speaks no English and barely a word at all, but projects a spellbinding presence.

That same year, Sondergaard appeared in Fox’s The Mark Of Zorro. As the spoiled wife of tyrannical Don Luis Quintero (J. Edward Bromberg) she kept a lustful eye on the masked one’s alter ego (Tyrone Power in the dual lead).

Gale’s association with Universal horror began with The Black Cat (1941) as icy housekeeper Abigail Doone. Amid a houseful of cats and suspects that include Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi (as the gardener), Abigail becomes the unexpected heir (and subsequently the next target) after the elderly matriarch winds up with a knitting needle in her neck.

While Broderick Crawford and Hugh Herbert generated the laughs, Gale helped instigate the intrigue until she got it in the neck with a rope.

Re-teaming with The Cat And The Canary co-stars Bob Hope and George Zucco the following year, Gale led an enemy spy ring making life miserable for Bob in Paramount’s My Favorite Blonde.  She also took a hand in the war effort in Columbia's formula mystery thriller, Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen, in 1942.

Back at Universal, she appeared in three 1944 releases, including perhaps her most famous role, the calculating "female Moriarty," Miss Adrea Spedding in Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman. Arachnid bites are driving wealthy men to kill themselves after designating Miss Spedding as their insurance beneficiary. The ace detective is on the case, but is lured into a carnival tent trap by his wily opponent. "Come in, Mister Holmes. Don’t stand in the drafty corridor. I should hate to have you take cold and die of natural causes."

To that end she has Holmes tied up behind a shooting gallery and declares "We shall allow the British public to be your executioner." Holmes escapes before Doctor Watson himself can fire the fatal shot, and the smiling Miss Spedding is escorted, presumably to jail, on the arm of Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey).

In Universal’s The Climax, Gale plays the housekeeper who helps foil the deadly designs of Dr. Hohner (Boris Karloff), who keeps his wife’s preserved corpse in a secret room. This follow-up to the studio’s color hit Phantom Of The Opera used many of the same sets and cast.

Some restructuring could have made The Climax a better movie, but the murderer is revealed much too soon. The film remains an entertaining enough hodgepodge of melodrama, mystery, murder and a hint of necrophilia, along with music and light comedy.

As Lady Irene Herrick, Gale was but one target of The Invisible Man’s Revenge (Universal, 1944). Playing Evelyn Ankers’ mother, Sondergaard herself disappears about midway through the picture upon catching sight of the water-splashed face of her unseen tormentor Robert Griffin (Jon Hall), an already- deranged man made invisible by a local scientist (John Carradine).

Also in fear for his life is Irene’s husband, Sir Jasper, played by Lester Matthews, the would-be hero of Universal’s 1935 The Raven and Were Wolf Of London.

Another trio of Universal pictures featuring Gale Sondergaard lit up the screens in 1946. Night In Paradise was a Universal attempt at a fantasy epic. Gale plays the jealous sorceress-Queen Attossa in this otherwise routine costume romance set in the kingdom of Lydia around 560 B.C. Whether materializing in a flame, on a wall ornament, or as a reflection in a pond from which she hands Aesop (Turhan Bey) a vial of poison, Sondergaard provides most of the interest during a rather limited amount of screen time.

In the haunted house comedy The Time Of Their Lives, Gale, as psychic housekeeper Emily, plays host to Bud Abbott & Lou Costello in the séance scene. Costello plays the bumbling ghost of a man wrongly-accused of treason, shot and dumped in a well during the Revolutionary War. Upon seeing the dour Emily, he wonders what well she came out of!

In The Spider Woman Strikes Back, Sondergaard doesn’t portray the sly Adrea Spedding (unless you choose to believe that was an alias), but the seemingly blind Zenobia Dollard. It is soon apparent that the kindly Zenobia is not blind and that she’s poisoning area cattle in an effort to scare off neighbors and get her lands back.

The poison is made from flowers that feed on spiders and human blood. Instead of matching wits with Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone), Gale has to settle for Milburn Stone. It’s a far cry from the earlier film, even though sometime-Creeper Rondo Hatton is on hand as Zenobia’s menacing mute butler.

Also in 1946, Miss Sondergaard received her second Academy Award nomination, this time as the first of the King’s wives in Fox’s Anna And The King Of Siam.

Sondergaard’s film career ground to a halt with the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, when she and her husband were among many political leftists caught up in the House Committee on Un-American Activity’s contemptible crusade to ferret out suspected Communists. Ironically, she had earlier appeared in the witch trial drama Maid Of Salem (1935). As a result of the modern day "witch hunt" of the Fifties, the careers of many innocent people were ruined. After 1949, Sondergaard did not work in pictures again for nearly twenty years.

Her return to films kicked off with the psycho drama Savage Intruder (1969) starring Miriam Hopkins in her final film as a has-been film star whose male nurse happens to be a serial killer.

Sondergaard plays Hopkins’ suspicious maid. Among the veteran cast members is Gale’s Invisible man’s Revenge co-star Lester Matthews. The movie was also known as The Comeback and Hollywood Horror House.

A number of television appearances in the late Sixties and early Seventies include a Night Gallery episode entitled "The Dark Boy," the touching tale of a haunted schoolhouse.

Director Curtis Harrington cast Sondergaard in his and screenwriter Robert Bloch’s 1973 TV movie The Cat Creature. As Hester Black ("Sounds like a witch, doesn’t it?" she kids her new employee) she’s the proprietress of an occult novelty shop, while on the side she’s a dealer of stolen goods. Gale’s entrance from behind a curtain of beads is reminiscent of that in The Letter over 30 years earlier.

A mystic medallion places Hester and other interested parties in peril at the claws of a re-incarnated Egyptian Cat Goddess (played by Meredith Baxter). The cast of The Cat Creature includes veterans David (The Fly) Hedison, Keye Luke (best known for playing Charlie Chan’s number-one son), Kent Smith (from the original Cat People), John (The Vampire’s Ghost) Abbott, Stuart (Night Of The Lepus) Whitman, Milton (frequent film undertaker) Parsons, John (practically Everything) Carradine, and some guy who called himself Peter Lorre Junior (no relation to filmdom’s Lord High Minister of All That Is Sinister).

Over the years, Gale continued occasional stage work. Her final film appearance was in the 1983 supernatural drama Echoes (on DVD under the title Living Nightmare). An artist is haunted by dreams, and a psychic (a fitting final role for Miss Sondergaard) believes the cause to be a twin spirit from another dimension.

Gale Sondergaard died at age 86 on August 14, 1985 of cerebral vascular thrombosis, just two weeks before the death of Evelyn Ankers. During the Silver Age of Universal Horror and Mystery, the studio never cast Gale in the type of nice girl roles that Evelyn got.

Even when playing characters on the side of good, Gale Sondergaard brought a cool air of foreboding to her portrayals that made them even more interesting. Whether as a schemer, a housekeeper, a devoted wife, matriarch, or in a number of other roles, Gale played them with a touch of class that will always remain uniquely hers.

Thanks, Joe.  Gale Sondergaard was certainly a delightfully wicked presence in many a horror and thriller film during the Golden Years of Hollywood.  She did kind of shoot herself in the foot for not stopping her pro-Communist activities after World War Two ended and it became clear that Stalin was not our ally any more.  Still, it's a shame that politics snuffed out such a great career.  At any rate, we shall always remember Gale Sondergaard fondly as the Spider Woman and she's well entrenched in HORROR-WOOD's Hall of Horror Film Heroines.

Article copyright © Joe Winters

Return To Archives