<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Gale Sondergaard (Edith Sondergaard) (February 15, 1899 – August 14, 1985) was a sinister-looking American actress who usually played scheming femme fatales or menacing housekeepers in such films as The Cat and the Canary (1939), The Black Cat (1941), The Climax (1944), The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944), The Time of Their Lives (1946), Road to Rio (1947), and The Cat Creature (1973). She won the first ever Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1936 for her role in Anthony Adverse, although perhaps her finest moments were as Andrea Spedding, who pitted her wits against Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in The Spider Woman (1943), and mad scientist Zenobia Dollard in the sequel-in-name-only, The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946). Sondergaard was blacklisted-through-association by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt of the early 1950s and her career never really recovered.