Who was Margaret Hamilton?
The lady you see in the photograph is Margaret Hamilton. Do you recognise her?
The chances are that you’ve seen her on the screen, especially in her most famous role.
She played that part in an old movie – you can tell from the photograph that she’s not an actress of today but she was still appearing on the screen in 1982.
Although her most famous part was in a movie dating from 1939, I imagine that a good percentage of people have seen it.
Let me tell you a little bit about her and you might guess about her most famous role.
She received some pretty nasty burns when she was playing the part. She was hospitalized and had to recuperate for six weeks before she could rejoin the cast.
In this part, she played the bad guy. She was regarded as number four in a list of the ‘fifty best movie villains of all time’. The film won a huge number of awards and is on many ‘best of’ lists. It’s known today as one of the best films in movie history.
Her distant cousin was Neil Hamilton who played Commissioner Gordon in the 1960s television series, Batman. But not everyone in the family was in show business. Her sister Dorothy was an advocate of women’s rights and birth control.
She loved children and animals. She worked for charities to benefit them throughout her life. In fact, she was trained as a kindergarten teacher and this was her career before she started acting. The fact that she was so charitable towards children is quite ironic really…
When she suffered burns on the set of her most famous movie and had recovered, she said that she would go back to work on one condition – ‘no more fireworks’. Coincidentally, her understudy / stand-in also suffered burns during the filming.
When Margaret played her most famous role, the star of the movie was only seventeen years old. This star’s character had the same first name as Margaret’s sister (see number three above). Margaret’s character also had a sister in the film but they were very different.
Margaret played two parts in the film. In addition to her famous role, she also had a small part at the beginning of the movie. Her first words in the film are ‘I’d like to speak with you and your wife right away’.
Figured it out? Scroll down to see her in action on the video below.
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