‘The Wizard of Oz’ Wicked Witch Actress Suffers Unforgettable Pain After Being Burned on Set (Exclusive)

Despite the hardships she experienced, actress Margaret Hamilton “loved” her time on the 1939 classic, ‘Oz’ expert and author John Fricke tells PEOPLE

• With Evil in the cinemas, PEOPLE look back on The Wizard of Oz

• Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West, was burned on set, and removing the makeup around the wounds caused indescribable pain

• She also had toned green skin in the months following filming

It wasn’t always easy being green for Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.

In 1939, almost a century before Cynthia Erivo went viridescent too origin story of the witch i EvilHamilton famously played the campy, cackling villain who terrorizes the inhabitants of the magical land of Oz.

And Hamilton – who died aged 82 in 1985 – went through a particularly painful “ordeal”, according to Oz expert John Fricke, the author of The Wizard of Oz, the Official 50th Anniversary Picture Story and The Wizard of Oz, an illustrated companion to the timeless film classic.

It was largely due to an accident she had while filming a scene with Judy Garlands character Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road. After the witch tells the gingham-clad Kansan and her puppy Toto, “I’ll get you my beautiful and your little dog, too,” she disappears in a cloud of red smoke and fire.

Fricke says Hamilton was told to stand on an elevator platform built into the floor of the Yellow Brick Road, which would lower her down (along with the broom she was holding) as the red smoke clouded her exit. Once she was fully lowered under the set, the crew would send fire up through nearby floor vents.

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And in those early days of Hollywood long before CGI, “it had to be real fire,” notes Fricke.

“They rehearsed it and rehearsed it all one morning and they got it on the first take. Maggie said the line, she whirled around, she got to the elevator, the smoke came up, they dropped her through the floor, she cleared the floor, the fire came up perfectly , and there was a lot of cheering on the set,” according to Fricke.

“But then it was lunchtime and they all left together. And as Maggie used to say, when everyone came back after lunch, they were all a little bit less attentive, less friendly than they were first thing in the morning. And there were mistakes every time they tried to get a new take,” continues Fricke.

Director Victor Fleming — “a no-nonsense man’s man,” grew impatient with the technicians, Fricke says. “He read them the riot act in indeterminate language.”

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The next time they tried the site, the technicians released the fire through the vents before Hamilton was completely submerged through the floor.

“Her shoulders and her head and the broomstick and her hat, which also had the hanging piece of gauze off of it, so much was still above the ground,” he says. “The gas caught fire, the broomstick caught fire.”

Crew members stationed below to help Hamilton out of the platform elevator “quickly smothered the fire, but it wasn’t quick enough,” Fricke says. “The broomstick was next to her face and near her right hand. And the result was that she had second-degree burns on her face, third-degree burns on her hand where the green makeup was.”

Fricke says crew members whipped Hamilton to the side and told her they needed to clean her skin immediately so the potentially toxic makeup, which contained copper, didn’t seep into the wound.

“‘Ms. Hamilton, we’ve got to get this makeup off you. Green is toxic and the copper will burn into your skin and disfigure you for real if we don’t get it all off your face,'” they told Hamilton . according to Fricke, who befriended the actress in the decade before her death.

“And they took rubbing alcohol and cleaned her face and removed her hand. And I’ve heard her tell this story many times. She said, ‘I’m going to have to scream.’ She said: ‘I will never, as long as I live, forget the pain of rubbing alcohol on the two burns,’ says Fricke.

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Was the makeup itself to blame for the burns? Probably not. “From what Maggie used to say, she was burned because the denser-than-dense flames instantly jumped from the broomstick in her hand—and the trailing gauze from her hat—to her face and hand,” Fricke explains.

“It was a very small elevator shaft, and the smoke and fire vents were immediately around its opening. And she was badly burned, as anyone would have been when caught in a fire like that,” he continues. Nevertheless, the makeup removal was unbearable.

Hamilton recovered for six weeks and returned to finish filming the role. When she packed, she took something of a souvenir with her: Toned skin.

“She said that in the months after the shooting, people said, ‘You look a little green.’ Her skin had absorbed some of the green, and it took her a while to get it off her skin or out of her system,” says Fricke.

Despite all that, Hamilton considered making the film a positive experience, according to Fricke. “She loved it,” he says. “She was very proud of it until the day she died.”

Wicked: Part One is in the cinema now, med Second part set for publication 21 November 2025.