Always the Nominee: Agnes Moorehead

She was one of the great character actors of the stage, radio, screen, and television. She worked with greats as diverse as Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk and Robert Aldrich. I am, of course, talking about the incomparable Agnes Moorehead. Perhaps best remembered by modern audiences as Endora from Bewitched in all her extreme blue eye shadow and orange-haired glory, Moorehead had a long and respected film career prior to that. Her early career pairings with Orson Welles led to her debut in Citizen Kane, and she quickly became a contract-player for MGM where she frequently added color in bit parts or outright stole the show. She was borrowed out for two Douglas Sirk melodramas that rank among her best work (Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows), originated the role in the radio play Sorry, Wrong Number, and yes, eventually essayed the role of the flamboyant mother-in-law Endora.

But between 1942 and 1964, Moorehead got four Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress. While the film industry eventually came to honor and make use of her gifts, her initial try at the behest of Helen Hayes was met with indifference. Stating that she was not “the right type” for films after her auditions, she returned to radio and developed her gift for vocal intonations and distinct characterizations. It is this skill that is most clearly highlighted in her eventual film career. Moorehead could attack her line readings like a highly-trained operatic singer finding nuance, color, and texture both in what is being said and what is going on just beneath those words. 

Her partnership with Welles and the Mercury Theater was fruitful and serendipitous. Not only did it provide her consistent employment, it offered her a wide range of parts, and led to her first film roles as Welles populated his earliest films with his friends and players from the Mercury Theater. Once you see Moorehead as Charles Foster Kane’s mother, it is nearly impossible to forget her. She appears severe like a walking memory of a fuzzily remembered authority figure.

It is a shame that her partnership with Welles came to an abrupt halt after 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons as they were clearly just hitting their creative heights together. If she is severe and untouchable in Kane then she is brought down to earth and desperate for connection here. Her Aunt Fanny is a pitiful and yet strangely likable creation, a woman whose archness and theatricality recall a decaying world of gentility, ornate customs, and chivalry as new technologies render the hermetically sealed world of the Ambersons obsolete.

Fanny is the spinster sister of the family. Her voice suggests finishing schools and proper etiquette training while also a lifetime of being the forgotten sibling, the one overlooked and given short shift. There is always a manic desire to be loved and seen which is counterbalanced by a tremendous sadness at her core. Moorehead’s genius is in finding not only the middle ground of these modes but the ways in which they intersect or feed into each other.

Cloistered in black mourning attire, Fanny is a repressed, unhappy woman looking for her place within a society that has rendered her entirely useless. She should be content enough to live in her rarefied, well-mannered world and not seek independent prospects or love from her unrequited object of affection (Joseph Cotten’s widower) or so the town’s gossip goes. Anyone would potentially break under such suffocating confinement and brutish pushing into the shadows. Fanny, as Moorehead presents her, is often a ghostly apparition longing to be made real.

While the entire acting ensemble is keyed into Welles’ various demands and emotional crescendos, Moorehead really understand this woman in her marrow. She manages to make various outbursts play like she is releasing pressurized valves so she does not explode until the climax where she finally does breakdown. But this is not to say that Moorehead plays it all in one key. Very much the opposite as she routinely colors her emotions or line readings with bits of ironic detachment or barely concealed neediness when we least expect it. Even better are the various silent reaction shots where Moorehead communicates entire reams of internal monologues with the downturn of her eyes or the pursing of her lips.

If one were to write down the handful of most essential performances of her career then surely Aunt Fanny would be near the top of it. When we finally reach her breaking point, where Fanny rests against the cold boiler and wishes it were turned on so it would scald her into feeling something, we have bared witness to one of the great supporting turns of the 1940s. In a sane and just world, Moorehead would have easily walked away with the industry’s highest honor.

There was just a little problem, Mrs. Miniver. 1942 saw the US entering the fray and patriotic fervor was at an all-time high. Mrs. Miniver, a quiet and lovely little movie about a woman keeping the home fires burning while the English blitz rages all around her, dominated not only in nominations that year but in wins. For her portrayal of the doomed daughter-in-law in Mrs. Miniver, Teresa Wright, a double nominee (Best Actress for The Pride of the Yankees), won. Frankly, Wright’s performance here is perfectly serviceable but nowhere near as strong as what Moorehead accomplished. Hell, Wright’s work pales in comparison to what she accomplished in The Little Foxes, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Best Years of Our Lives.

At least Moorehead won some precursors, such as they existed at the time. Both the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle Awards presented her with their Best Actress laurels. She may not have won the big prize, but at least she was lauded and acknowledged for her stupendous work in Welles’ troubled masterpiece. If only they had worked together again in one of his later works like Macbeth or Touch of Evil.

1944’s Mrs. Parkington has Moorehead adopting a French accent and playing up her reactions as the Baroness Aspasia Conti. She is a lot of fun in an otherwise sluggish MGM super-production that gave star Greer Garson another chance to play a great lady from youth to old age alongside Walter Pidgeon. But it is the likes of Moorehead and Gladys George who spark when they are onscreen. They manage to jolt some life into this thing.

For all of her grandiose acting, Moorehead also knew when to dial it back for maximum impact. Her introduction is all cursive sounding accent work and making her voice sound like an operatic solo, then when in quiet contemplation her face falls and we see waves of contradictory emotions and thoughts blur across her face. She was at her best in moments like these.

But Mrs. Parkington fails both of its nominated women, Garson in lead and Moorehead in supporting, by not giving them quite enough to do or enough to explore. Garson gets sacked with “The Wife” role, despite being the titular one she is largely exempt from a rich inner life, while Moorehead gets to go full Technicolor with her European aristocrat. A character actress to her core, Moorehead could make a delicious meal out of the scarcest ingredients, which is basically what she does here.

Leaning heavily into that her outlandish voice and theatrical training, Moorehead crafts an exquisite pastry of a woman. Glittery outfits and hair piled upon her head, she flicks her fan and moves through the room delivering snappy lines and giving solid advice under her breath. It is essentially a drag performance that pops off in the background while the leads do the best with the wooden material.

Come that Oscar ceremony, Moorehead lost to Ethel Barrymore in None but the Lonely Heart, another beloved veteran character actress in a film that received a lukewarm reception. The limited precursors do not reveal much, but Moorehead won the Golden Globe that year while Barrymore won the National Board of Review. An interesting historical point here, the first entry in this series focused on follow nominee Angela Lansbury, who got her first Oscar nomination in Gaslight this same year.

1948’s Johnny Belinda, in which she plays the aunt of Jane Wyman’s Belinda MacDonald, brought along her third Oscar nomination. Moorehead plays a thickly accented (Irish) and borderline unlikable person who openly mocks and scoffs at her deaf-mute niece. She was great in this kind of severe roles that require a consummate amount of skill to render them as something close to human and not gross caricatures. She even manages to make her eventual softening towards her niece clearly communicated and believable.

In her earliest scenes, Moorehead’s Aggie is glimpsed maneuvering about the family’s farm doing various chores like making bread. Aggie must immediately appear as a stubbornly proud woman who goes about her day, and she delivers on this front. Her casual tossing off of “dummy” in relation to Belinda demonstrates a resignation to her preconceived notions of the disabled girl. Her notions are wrong, of course, and Moorehead slowly thaws the ice in that familial relationship as she watches Belinda learn to communicate.

After learning that Belinda was sexually assaulted and pregnant with her rapist’s child, Aggie breaks down and becomes a surrogate mother figure towards the girl. Aggie’s emotional outbursts feel like long simmering explosions from years of slowly building. When Aggie sees Belinda carrying heavy buckets, she immediately swoops in like a mother hen and tries valiantly to keep the secret before succumbing to the nervous energies running in her veins. She knows that Belinda’s father will react violently to the news, and Charles Bickford’s demands of knowing who the culprit was are menacing for his stentorian bellows, and tries to protect the peace of the situation.

But a personal favorite might be the scene where Belinda gives birth and Aggie functions as midwife/nurse for her niece. There is a quick closeup of Moorehead’s character in prayer and on her face you can see all the love and concern that has developed in this character towards the young girl without her saying a word. Just quick mouth movements while she closes her eyes and takes a breath. It is the kind of quiet work that counterbalances the scenes of grand pronouncements and big emotional eruptions.

Forsaking vanity in an era of strict glamour, Moorehead was never afraid to appear sans makeup, slovenly, or unkempt if the part required it. Aggie is a simple, buttoned-up woman in boxy knit vests and a tight bun. Part of Moorehead’s chameleonic abilities as an actress were the ways she could lean into makeup, costuming, and unique vocal choices to build-up these disparate women.

Come Oscar nominations morning, Johnny Belinda cleaned up with twelve, the most of any film that year. While it would only go on to win one – Jane Wyman in Best Actress. Moorehead’s competition that year was the likes of Jean Simmons in Hamlet, Barbara Bel Geddes and Ellen Corby in I Remember Mama, and Claire Trevor in Key Largo. In one of my personal favorite wins in the category, Claire Trevor won for her drunken, aging gangster’s moll performance, a part that is as juicy as it is tragic.

But the scant precursors demonstrated a category in flux: Corby won the Golden Globe and Simmons won Venice. This did not seem like one of Moorehead’s stronger chances of winning, despite the impressive nominations haul. Looking back on it now, it seems obvious that a previous nominee who was also a well-liked veteran without the gold and impressive list of credits to her name would win, and Trevor had the showier role in her blowsy former glamour girl.

Sixteen years after her last invitation of the soiree, Moorehead returned with 1964’s Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the spiritual cousin to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Somehow this eccentric, go-for-broke, often insane successor bested that film in total Oscar nominations, seven for Sweet Charlotte to five for Baby Jane. This actually means that it broke the record for most nominations for a horror up to that time. To say that Sweet Charlotte lacks restraint is a both something entirely true and an understatement. This is also why it is so damn entertaining.

Bette Davis once again plays an eccentric dealing with the trauma of some long ago tragedy that fractured her mental state. Moorehead is her housemaid. A slovenly butch woman named Velma that Moorehead starts at an 8.5 and only gets bigger, broader, and louder from there. She and Davis match each other’s energy and turn overacting into a kind of free form jazz that feeds off of the other’s idiosyncratic rhythms.

At once her protector and nursemaid, Velma is the type of selfless and loyal character who rarely, if ever, makes it to the final reel of the film. Spoiler, I suppose, for a film that is 62-years-old as of this writing. It is also a bit of a shock to see Moorehead so dumpy after playing so many great ladies, queens, high society types, and urbane sophisticates. In hindsight, this nomination does not seem so strange. It fits a certain archetype that has repeated often enough over the decades – beloved veteran actor makes an entire multi-course meal out of a supporting part in a genre film (examples include: Ruth Gordon, Piper Laurie, Whoopi Goldberg, Toni Collette, Amy Madigan).

What is shocking is that she managed to win the Golden Globe for this over two of her fellow Oscar nominees (Grayson Hall (The Night of the Iguana) and eventual winner Lila Kedrova (Zorba the Greek)), and a bit that she got nominated at all. Moorehead is wildly entertaining in the film but it is not exactly a layered or complex role. She matches the lack of restraint exhibited by Davis and injects a certain slatternly humor into the part but the real standout supporting actress here is Mary Astor in her final film role. Perhaps that two scene wonder was too small, or too ghostly self-possessed to impress voters like Moorehead mugging her way through a mansion while playing caretaker to Davis or sassing Olivia de Havilland. Still, Sweet Charlotte is worth a watch just for the sheer gonzo energy of the whole thing.

No matter, aside from the previously mentioned Kedrova and Hall, a pair of Dames rounded out the nominees that year – Gladys Cooper (My Fair Lady) and Edith Evans (The Chalk Garden). In looking at the five of them, it is an odd lot. Cooper was incapable of turning in a bad performance but her time is so limited as Mrs. Higgins while Evans plays the wealthy grandmother at the center of The Chalk Garden. It seemed like the Academy liked watching women of a certain age breaking under duress given the nominations for Evans, Hall, and Moorehead. I suppose Kedrova’s larger, juicier part as Madame Hortense made her win inevitable when looking at them all lined up. A proverbial apple in a bag of oranges.

And that was the end of the line for Moorehead and the Oscars. Four incredibly diverse nominations and unlike the previous entries in this series she never got the Honorary Oscar that her career richly deserved. Around this time Moorehead would start appearing in perhaps her most famous and best remembered role, Endora the meddling and antagonistic with witch mother-in-law in Bewitched. For her memorable role, bright orange hair, flowy gowns, and vibrant makeup, Moorehead would garner six Emmy nominations (and no wins, a reoccurring theme). Eventually, the Emmys would be smart enough to give her a prize in 1967 for her work in The Wild Wild West.

For such a critically renowned and respected actress of her era, Moorehead won shockingly little hardware. It was as though her incredible range was taken for granted or as a given. No lifetime achievement awards from various film groups, no Kennedy Center Honor, or honorary Tony despite her central place in not only some of the best beloved and respected stage works of her period, no honorary Oscar despite film roles that have lasted throughout the decades and demonstrated a remarkable range. There is Moorehead popping up in films as diverse as Jane Eyre, The Seventh Cross, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Dark Passage, and The Big Street.

Her final years were spent doing guest spots on television and occasional stage work. Like numerous other cast and crew members of 1956’s The Conqueror, Moorehead would die from cancer. She passed away from uterine cancer in 1974 at age 73. Yet what endures about Moorehead is a body of work that is astounding for its breadth of characterizations and genre hopping. She is as at home as one of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater players as she is as a Damon Runyon character as she is as a haughty queen in The Swan or a pioneer woman in How the West Was Won. She makes as much sense appearing in a supporting role in a colorful Douglas Sirk melodrama as she does a moodily lit noir with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. 

If these four Oscar nominations demonstrate anything, it is that Moorehead could do just about anything. She is more than Endora, which is no slight on that character as she is one that I deeply love but merely an observation that there is a lot of rewarding work to discover in her expansive filmography. These films are as good as any place to start before exploring further.