Not a 1967 event
The first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was not presented in 1967. The category was created in the mid-1930s, and its first winner was Gale Sondergaard, honoured for Anthony Adverse at the ceremony held in 1937 for films of 1936. The 1967 connection is that Sandy Dennis won the award at the April 1967 ceremony, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Why the category was added
The first Academy Awards, in 1929, had categories for lead performances only. For several years, a performer in a smaller role could be nominated only in the lead categories, or not at all. By the mid-1930s the Academy added awards for supporting players, reflecting how important character actors had become in the studio system. A film’s cast often depended on a deep bench of performers who were rarely the star but were central to its appeal.
The new categories debuted at the ceremony in March 1937, covering the film year 1936. Walter Brennan won the first supporting actor award, for Come and Get It, and Gale Sondergaard won the first supporting actress award.
The exact reasons for adding the categories are described in different ways in different accounts, and the reasoning is best summarised in general terms: the industry wanted to recognise a larger share of its workforce.
Gale Sondergaard and Anthony Adverse
Sondergaard played Faith Paleologus, a sinister housekeeper in Anthony Adverse, a large costume drama based on a bestselling novel. Her win at the first presentation made her a historic figure in the awards, though she is less remembered now than some later winners. She continued working in Hollywood in the following years, often in character roles with a threatening edge.
Her later career was interrupted. In the early 1950s she was called before a congressional committee investigating alleged communist influence in the film business, declined to cooperate, and was reportedly unable to find film work for many years. She returned to screen acting in the late 1960s. Her story is often cited as an example of how political pressure affected careers in the period.
Plaques instead of statuettes
An oddity of the early years concerns the physical award. Winners in the supporting categories reportedly received plaques rather than full statuettes for the first several years, and the full statuette was extended to supporting winners in the early 1940s. This detail is sometimes cited as a measure of how the category was initially seen: as a lesser prize attached to a more important one. The Academy treated it as a full category in later decades.
Sandy Dennis in April 1967
At the ceremony in April 1967, honouring films of 1966, Sandy Dennis won the Best Supporting Actress award for her role as Honey, the nervous young wife, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The film, directed by Mike Nichols, was one of the notable successes of that awards season, and Elizabeth Taylor won the Best Actress Oscar for the same film.
Dennis was a stage and screen actress known for a hesitant, naturalistic style, and the role showed how the supporting category could reward a performance that is central to a film while sitting beside a pair of stars.
The category in the late 1960s
The supporting categories remained prominent in the years that followed. At the April 1968 ceremony, Estelle Parsons won Best Supporting Actress for Bonnie and Clyde. At the same ceremony George Kennedy won Best Supporting Actor for Cool Hand Luke. These awards show how many of the era’s most talked-about films relied on strong secondary performances. It also reflects how, as the old studio contract system faded, supporting parts became a way for new talent from the theatre and television to reach a wider public.
A note on “firsts”
Statements about who was first at the Oscars depend heavily on how the rules were set at the time. In this case the answer is clear: Sondergaard was the first winner of the supporting actress award because she was the first person to receive it, at the first ceremony that offered it. The year, however, is 1937, not 1967, and the most reliable approach to any claim of a first is to check which ceremony introduced the category.