The Strange Woman is a 1946 American historical melodrama film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders and Louis Hayward.

In Bangor, Maine in 1824, a cruel young girl named Jenny Hager pushes a terrified Ephraim Poster into a river knowing he cannot swim.

She is prepared to let him drown until Judge Saladine happens by, at which point Jenny jumps into the water and takes credit for saving the boy's life.

She secretly schemes to wed the richest man in town, the much older timber baron Isaiah Poster, while his mild-mannered son Ephraim is away at college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Isaiah's superintendent in the timber business, John Evered, goes to confront Ephraim but is not sure whether to believe the harsh words he hears about Jenny.

A traveling evangelist, Lincoln Pettridge, preaches a sermon of fire and brimstone that results in Jenny's searing confession to her husband that all Ephraim had said about her was true.

[3] Douglas Sirk directed, uncredited, the opening sequence with Jenny Hager as a child: executive producer Hunt Stromberg declared his dissatisfaction with the original footage of Ulmer's own daughter Arianné who played the young Jenny – she was purportedly not nasty enough – and so he and Hedy Lamarr enlisted Sirk to reshoot the scenes using Jo Ann Marlowe who had appeared in Sirk's own A Scandal in Paris earlier that year,[4] and who had also featured as Joan Crawford's daughter Kay in Michael Curtiz' Mildred Pierce.