Eleanor Audley

Listen to how Lady Tremaine says "of course". Nothing in the words is unkind; it is a permission. Audley says it so that it lands as a refusal, in a voice that never rises and never hurries, and the stepmother of Cinderella (1950) is one of the studio's best villains largely because of it. She never lays a hand on the girl. She does not need to.

That voice was made elsewhere. Audley began on Broadway in 1926 and spent the 1940s and 1950s largely in radio, including a recurring part on Father Knows Best, work that teaches an actor to do everything with the throat. Film came late, from 1949, in supporting and uncredited parts, and then Disney. For Cinderella and for Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (1959) she did more than record the lines: she acted the parts in front of the animators, Frank Thomas and Marc Davis among them, so that the long grey face and the eyes that catch the light like a cat's are a drawing of her. From 1954 to 1970 she was a television regular, most durably as Eunice Douglas on Green Acres (1965–1969), the disapproving mother of Eddie Albert's lead. She retired around 1970.

What she does is contrast. Of Maleficent she said, "I tried to do a lot of contrasting to be both sweet and nasty at the same time," and that is the trick in both films: the courtesy is real, the threat sits under it, and the listener has to do the work of hearing both. It is a stage and radio technique and it has not dated, which is more than can be said for the Prince. We watched Cinderella again for this piece and found that one small permission from Lady Tremaine still made us tense in a way no amount of thunder from later animated villains manages. The quiet is what frightens.

The criticism is fair: forty-odd years on stage, radio and television, and she is remembered for two Disney voices and a head in a crystal ball at The Haunted Mansion (1969). The television parts are haughty, elegant and faintly appalled, the same instrument played in a lighter key, and Green Acres uses it for jokes rather than menace. But the reputation is not a mistake. Most actors are lucky to be the face of one villain. Audley is the voice and the face of two. Watch Cinderella with a child and notice that the stepmother is the only person in it the child goes quiet for.