Agnes Moorehead

Agnes Robertson Moorehead (December 6, 1900 – April 30, 1974) was an American actress. In a career spanning five decades, her credits included work in radio, stage, film, and television. Moorehead was the recipient of such accolades as a Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for four Academy Awards.

Moorehead joined Orson Welles's Mercury Players as one of his principal performers in 1937. She had notable roles in the films Citizen Kane (1941), Dark Passage (1947), Show Boat (1951), and All That Heaven Allows (1955). Moorehead received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, for her performances in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Mrs. Parkington (1944), Johnny Belinda (1948), and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). She is also known for the radio play Sorry, Wrong Number (1943).

She gained acclaim for her role as Endora on the ABC sitcom Bewitched, which she played from 1964 to 1972. Her performance earned her six nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. For her role on the western series The Wild Wild West, she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

Early life Agnes Robertson Moorehead was born on December 6, 1900, in Clinton, Massachusetts, the daughter of former singer Mary (née McCauley), who was 17 when she gave birth to Agnes, and Presbyterian clergyman John Henderson Moorehead. Moorehead later claimed that she was born in 1906 to appear younger for acting parts. She recalled that she made her first public performance at the age of three, when she recited the Lord's Prayer in her father's church. The family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and her ambition to become an actress grew "very strong". Her mother indulged her active imagination, often asking, "Who are you today, Agnes?" while Moorehead and her younger sister Peggy (born Margaret Ann) engaged in mimicry. This involved coming to the dinner table and imitating their father's parishioners; they were further encouraged by his amused reactions.

As a young woman, Moorehead joined the chorus of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company, known as "The Muny". In addition to her interest in acting, she developed a lifelong interest in religion; in later years, actors such as Dick Sargent recalled Moorehead's arriving on the set with "the Bible in one hand and the script in the other". and served for a year on its board of trustees. When her family moved to Reedsburg, Wisconsin, she taught public school for five years in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, while she also earned a master's degree in English and public speaking at the University of Wisconsin (now the University of Wisconsin-Madison). She then pursued postgraduate studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, from which she graduated with honors in 1929. Moorehead also received an honorary doctoral degree from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.

Career Moorehead's early acting career was unsteady, and although she was able to find stage work, she was often unemployed. She later recalled going four days without food, and said that it had taught her "the value of a dollar". She found work in radio and was soon in demand, often working on several programs in a single day. She believed that it offered her excellent training and allowed her to develop her voice to create a variety of characterizations. Moorehead met the actress Helen Hayes, who encouraged her to enter films, but her first attempts were met with failure. She performed in his The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio adaptations, and had a regular role opposite Welles in the serial The Shadow as Margo Lane. In 1939, Welles moved the Mercury Theatre to Hollywood, where he started working for RKO Pictures. Several of his radio performers joined him, and Moorehead made her film debut as the mother of his own character, Charles Foster Kane, in Citizen Kane and an Academy Award nomination for her performance. She also appeared in Journey Into Fear (1943), a Mercury film production.

Moorehead received positive reviews for her performance in Mrs. Parkington (1944), and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and an Academy Award nomination. Moorehead played another strong role in The Big Street (1942) with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball, and then appeared in two films that failed to find an audience, Government Girl (1943) with Olivia de Havilland and The Youngest Profession (1944) with an adolescent Virginia Weidler.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer By the mid-1940s, Moorehead had become a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player, negotiating a $6,000-a-week contract, which also allowed her to perform on radio, an unusual clause at the time. Moorehead explained that MGM usually refused to allow its actors to appear on radio, as "the actors didn't have the knowledge or the taste or the judgment to appear on the right sort of show."

Throughout her career, Moorehead portrayed puritanical matrons, neurotic spinsters, possessive mothers, and comical secretaries. She had supporting roles in The Youngest Profession (1943), Since You Went Away (1944), and the crime drama Dark Passage (1947), starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. From 1942 to 1949, Moorehead played the role of the mayor's housekeeper in the radio version of Mayor of the Town. She also starred in The Amazing Mrs. Danberry, a situation comedy on CBS in 1946. Moorehead's title character was described as "the lively widow of a department store owner who has a tongue as sharp as a hatpin and a heart as warm as summer." Moorehead played one of her last roles on January 6, 1974, as Mrs. Ada Canby in the ironically titled "The Old Ones Are Hard to Kill", the inaugural episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

Films and stage appearances of the 1950s–1960s

In the 1950s, Moorehead continued to work in films and appeared on stage across the country. Her stage roles included a national tour of Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, co-starring Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, and Cedric Hardwicke, and the pre-Broadway engagements of the new musical The Pink Jungle. She had a supporting role in the big-budget Howard Hughes film The Conqueror (1956), starring John Wayne and Susan Hayward, a film she later regretted appearing in. She starred in The Bat (1959) with Vincent Price. She appeared as the hypochondriac Mrs. Snow in Disney's hit film Pollyanna (1960). She starred with Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Mary Astor, and Joseph Cotten in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) as the maid Velma, a role for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award.

Television In 1959, Moorehead guest-starred on many series, including The Rebel and Alcoa Theatre. Her role in the radio play Sorry, Wrong Number inspired writers of the CBS television series The Twilight Zone to script an episode with Moorehead in mind. In "The Invaders" (broadcast January 27, 1961), Moorehead played a woman whose isolated farm is plagued by mysterious intruders. Moorehead found the script odd because it had only one line of dialogue, at the very end. Her character gasped in terror once or twice, but never spoke. In Sorry, Wrong Number, Moorehead offered a famed, bravura performance using only her voice.

Moorehead also had guest roles on Channing, Custer, Rawhide in "Incident at Poco Tiempo" as Sister Frances, and The Rifleman. On February 10, 1967, she portrayed Miss Emma Valentine in "The Night of the Vicious Valentine" on The Wild Wild West, a performance for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. The role brought her a level of recognition that she had not received before, as Bewitched was in the top-10 programs for the first few years it aired.

Moorehead received six Emmy Award nominations for her work on the series, but was quick to remind interviewers that she had enjoyed a long and distinguished career, commenting to the New York Daily News in 1965, "I've been in movies and played theatre from coast to coast, so I was quite well known before 'Bewitched,' and I don't particularly want to be identified as the witch." Despite her ambivalence, she remained with Bewitched until its run ended in 1972. Prior to her death in 1974, she said she had enjoyed playing the role enough, but it was not challenging, and the show itself was "not breathtaking", although her flamboyant and colorful character appealed to children. She expressed a fondness for the show's star, Elizabeth Montgomery, and said she had enjoyed working with her. Co-star Dick Sargent, who in 1969 replaced the ill Dick York as Samantha's husband Darrin Stephens, had a more difficult relationship with Moorehead, describing her as "a tough old bird."

In fall 1964, Moorehead participated in a 5-minute commercial spot featuring casts of both Bonanza and Bewitched, announcing the new 1965 Chevrolet line. Moorehead was featured with Dan Blocker extolling the virtues of the new '65 Chevy II.

Later years In the 1970s, Moorehead's life was increasingly affected by declining health. In 1970, she appeared as a dying woman who haunts her own house in the early Night Gallery episode "Certain Shadows on the Wall". She co-starred with Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds in the horror film What's the Matter with Helen? (1971) and had the lead role in the low-budget ax murderer film Dear Dead Delilah (1972) with Will Geer, her last starring role. She also reprised her role in Don Juan in Hell on Broadway and on tour, with an all-star cast that featured Edward Mulhare, Ricardo Montalbán, and Paul Henreid.

Moorehead supplied the voice of the friendly "Goose" in Hanna-Barbera's 1973 adaptation of E. B. White's children's book Charlotte's Web.

For the 1973 Broadway adaptation of Gigi, Moorehead portrayed Aunt Alicia and performed various songs, including "The Contract" for the original cast recording. She fell ill during the production, resulting in Arlene Francis having to replace her. Moorehead died shortly afterward.

In January 1974, three months before her death, two episodes featuring Moorehead (including the series' premiere episode) aired on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, the popular radio show produced and directed by Himan Brown.

Personal life Marriages

In 1930, Moorehead married actor John Griffith Lee. They divorced in 1952, a year after fostering a boy named Sean Lee. She married actor Robert Gist in 1954, and they divorced in 1958.

Sexuality Moorehead's sexuality had been the subject of much speculation and dispute. A number of articles that appeared in periodicals in the alternative press have identified her as a lesbian. Paul Lynde, Moorehead's co-star on Bewitched, stated: "Well, the whole world knows Agnes was a lesbian - I mean classy as hell, but one of the all-time Hollywood dykes". Journalist Boze Hadleigh reported an incident, also sourced to Lynde, in which, when she caught one of her husbands cheating on her, "Agnes screamed at him that if he could have a mistress, so could she." In a 1973 interview with Hadleigh, when afforded the opportunity to either confirm or, once and for all, put to rest the rumors regarding her sexual orientation, Moorehead "wryly" opts to do neither:

Moorehead's close friend Debbie Reynolds stated categorically that Moorehead was not a lesbian. Reynolds's autobiography mentions the rumor and states it was started "maliciously" by one of Moorehead's husbands during their divorce. Moorehead's longtime friend and producer Paul Gregory concurs in that assessment. Quint Benedetti, Moorehead's longtime employee who was gay, also stated that Moorehead was not a lesbian and attributed the story to Paul Lynde's frequent gossiping and rumor-mongering.

Politics Moorehead rarely spoke publicly about her political beliefs, but she supported both Franklin Delano Roosevelt (she portrayed Eleanor Roosevelt multiple times over the course of her career) and close friend Ronald Reagan for his 1966 run for governor of California.

Death Moorehead was one of many people to have developed cancer after exposure to radioactive fallout from atmospheric atomic bomb tests while making The Conqueror (1956) with John Wayne in Iron City, Utah. Several production members, as well as Wayne himself, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz (who died by suicide while suffering from cancer), and the film's director Dick Powell, later died from cancer and cancer-related illnesses. The cast and crew totalled 220 people. By the end of 1980, as ascertained by People, 91 of them had developed some form of cancer, and 46 had died of the disease.

Moorehead died at Mayo Clinic Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, on April 30, 1974, due to uterine cancer at the age of 73.

Moorehead is entombed in a crypt at Dayton Memorial Park in Dayton, Ohio. In 1994, she was posthumously inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Moorehead bequeathed $25,000 to Muskingum College, with instructions to fund one or more "Agnes Moorehead Scholarships". She also left half of her manuscripts to Muskingum—a Presbyterian school founded by her uncle—with the other half going to the University of Wisconsin. Her family's Ohio farm went to Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, along with her collection of Bibles and biblical scholarship materials. Moorehead's father was a Presbyterian minister, and in 1921, when Agnes was an undergraduate at Muskingum, the college presented an honorary degree to Bob Jones, Sr.

Moorehead's mother, Mary, received all of Moorehead's clothing and jewelry, and Moorehead made provisions to support Mary for the rest of her life. The Beverly Hills home was left to Moorehead's attorney, Franklin Rohner, along with the furnishings and personal property within. Small bequests were made for friends and domestic staff, along with some charitable contributions. In her will, she made no provision for her foster son Sean Lee. In fact, she had fostered Sean only until his 18th birthday, and her will stated that she had "no children, natural or adopted, living or deceased".

Acting credits Filmography

Television Year Title Role Notes 1952 Poor Mr. Campbell Adrice Campbell Television movie 1953The Revlon Mirror Theater Martha Adams Episode: "Lullaby" 1955 The Colgate Comedy Hour Aunt Minnie Episode: "Roberta"1956 Matinee Theatre Mrs. Barnes Episode: "Greybeards and Witches"Studio 57 Mrs. Tolliver Episode: "Teacher"1957 Climax! Irene Episode: "Locked in Fear" Wagon Train Mary Halstead Episode: "The Mary Halstead Story"1958 The DuPont Show of the Month Madame Defarge Episode: "A Tale of Two Cities" Playhouse 90 Rose Ganun Episode: "The Dungeon" Suspicion Katherine Searles Episode: "The Protege"1959 G.E. True Theatre Ana Konrad Bethlen Episode: "Deed of Mercy" Alcoa Theatre Mrs. Adams Episode: "Man of His House"The Rebel Mrs. Martha Lassiter Episode: "In Memoriam"1960 Startime Carmen Lynch Episode: "Closed Set"The Millionaire Katherine Boland Episode: "Millionaire Katherine Boland" The Chevy Mystery Show Elizabeth Marshall Episode: "Trial by Fury" Adventures in Paradise Jikiri Episode: "The Krismen" Rawhide Sister Frances S3:E8, "Incident at Poco Tiempo" Shirley Temple's Storybook Hepzibah PyncheonMombi the WitchWitch in Rapunzel 3 episodes The Rifleman Alberta 'Bertie' Hoakam Episode: "Miss Bertie" season 3, episode 141961 The Twilight Zone Woman Episode: "The Invaders" My Sister Eileen Aunt Harriet 2 episodes 1963–1965 Burke's Law Pauline MossDona Ynez Ortega y EstebanLiz Haggerty 2 episodes1964 Channing Professor Amelia Webster Episode: "Freedom Is a Lovesome Thing God Wot" The Greatest Show on Earth Millie Episode: "This Train Don't Stop Till It Gets There" 1964–1972 Bewitched Endora 146 episodes; Main role 1966 The Lone Ranger Black Widow Episode: "The Trickster/Crack of Doom/The Human Dynamo" 1966 Password Herself Game Show Contestant / Celebrity Guest Star1967 The Wild Wild West Emma Valentine Episode: "The Night of the Vicious Valentine" Custer Watoma Episode: "Spirit Woman"1969 Lancer Mrs. Normile Episode: "A Person Unknown" The Red Skelton Show Bertha Bluenose Episode: "He Wanted to Be a Square Shooter But He Found That his Barrel was Round"1970 Barefoot in the Park Mrs. Wilson Episode: "Pilot" The Virginian Emma Garvey Episode: "Gun Quest"1971 Night Gallery Emma Brigham 2 episodes Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color Mrs. Pringle Episode: "Strange Monster of Strawberry Cove" Love, American Style Mrs. Cooper Segment: "Love and the Particular Girl"1971 Marriage: Year One Grandma Duden Television movie Suddenly Single Marlene Television movie The Strange Monster of Strawberry Cove Mrs. Pringle Television movie1972 Marcus Welby, M.D. Mrs. Ramsey Episode: "He Could Sell Iceboxes to Eskimos" Rolling Man Grandmother Television movie Night of Terror Bronsky Television movie 1973 Frankenstein: The True Story Mrs. Blair Television movie 1974 Rex Harrison Presents Stories of Love Hercules's Wife Television movie

Theater Moorehead began appearing on stage during her training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She appeared in seven productions as a student. She continued acting in the theater throughout her career until just a few months before her death. Year Play Role 1928 Courage Understudy 1929 Soldiers and Women Understudy 1929 Scarlet Pages Company 1929 Candle Light Company 1934 All the King's Horses Company 1951 Don Juan In Hell Doña Ana. 1954 An Evening with Agnes Moorehead Herself 1957 The Rivalry Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas. Moorehead toured with the play but dropped out before its New York debut. 1959 The Pink Jungle Eleanor West 1962 Prescription: Murder Claire Fleming 1962 Lord Prego Miss Swanson 1963 High Spirits Madame Arcati 1973 Gigi Aunt Alicia

Radio Moorehead appeared on hundreds of individual broadcasts across a radio career that spanned from 1926 to her final two appearances, on CBS Radio Mystery Theater in 1974. Year Program Role 1929–1930 Believe It or Not Ensemble 1930–1933 Sherlock Holmes Ensemble 1931 The Ben Bernie Show Ensemble 1932–1933 Mysteries In Paris Nana 1933–1934 Evenings In Paris Anna 1933–1936 The Armour Hour Ensemble 1934 The Gumps Min 1934–1935 Heartthrobs of the Hills Ensemble 1935–1937 Dot and Will Rose 1935–1936 The New Penny 1936 Way Down East 1936–1938 The March of Time Ensemble / Eleanor Roosevelt. 1937 Terry and the Pirates The Dragon Lady 1937–1939 The Shadow Margo Lane 1938 The Mercury Theatre on the Air Ensemble 1938 The Campbell Playhouse Ensemble 1938–1941 Cavalcade of America Ensemble 1939–1940 Brenda Curtis Brenda's mother 1939–1940 The Aldrich Family Mrs. Brown 1940 The Adventures of Superman Lara 1941–1942 Bringing Up Father Maggie 1941–1942 Bulldog Drummond Ensemble 1942–1949 Mayor of the Town Marilly 1942–1960 Suspense Mrs. Elbert Stevenson 1974 CBS Radio Mystery Theater Ada Canby, Lorna Kitteridge

Awards and nominations Year Awards Category Nominated work Result1942 Academy Awards Best Supporting Actress The Magnificent Ambersons New York Film Critics Circle Best Actress 1944 Academy Awards Best Supporting Actress Mrs. Parkington Golden Globe Awards Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture 1948 Academy Awards Best Supporting Actress Johnny Belinda 1964 Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte Golden Globe Awards Best Supporting Actress 1966 Primetime Emmy Awards Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series Bewitched 1967 Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series 1968 Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series 1969 1970 1971 1967 Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series The Wild Wild West