Maleficent is a fictional character who appears in Walt Disney Pictures’ 16th animated feature film Sleeping Beauty (1959). She is an evil fairy and the self-proclaimed “Mistress of All Evil” who, after not being invited to a christening, curses the infant Princess Aurora to “prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die” before the sun sets on Aurora’s sixteenth birthday.

Maleficent is based on the evil fairy godmother character in Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty”, as well as the villainess who appears in the Brothers Grimm’s retelling of the story, “Little Briar Rose”. She was voiced by Eleanor Audley, who earlier voiced Lady Tremaine, Cinderella’s evil stepmother, in Cinderella (1950). Maleficent was animated by Marc Davis.