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Before she terrified audiences as The Wicked Witch of the West, Margaret Hamilton was a kindergarten teacher
"In those days, you did as you were told."
If you watched The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a child, chances are, you were terrified of The Wicked Witch of the West. Ironically, though she scared an entire generation of children on screen, actor Margaret Hamilton actually spent the beginning of her career nurturing young minds as a teacher.
As a student herself, Hamilton caught the acting bug, and even had plans to move to the big city after graduation to pursue a professional career.
“After the senior play in high school, my acting teacher and some of my family felt I ought to do something about my talent,” Hamilton said during an interview with Newsday. “And I felt that way. I was supposed to go to a dramatic school in New York, even though all my life I had planned on a career of teaching kindergarten in Cleveland. So I said to my mother that I wanted to go to New York instead, and she said, ‘You’ll do no such thing. You’ll go to teach kindergarten right here, and then you can fool around with the theater here all you want to.’ So, that’s what I did…In those days, you did as you were told.”
Though her professional dreams were thwarted by her mother, Hamilton still dreamt of performing, even after she began working as a teacher. By 1933, her dreams came true when she appeared in the MGM film Another Language. It was a small role, but it was only the beginning of a lengthy and successful acting career that was well worth the wait.
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