She may be remembered for her TV role as Endora the Witch on Bewitched, but Agnes Moorehead had one fine film career long before the small screen made her a household name.
She first showed her flair on radio — as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca among other vehicles — and then made a memorable transition to Hollywood in the early Forties with key roles in two of the finest movies ever made.
Yet despite her four Oscar nominations, she is often dismissed as a mere “character actress” as opposed to classic Hollywood movie star. We’ve often maintained that a performer can (and even should) try to be both.
In fact, although Moorehead was considered a premier character actress, she often transcended that limited description. And besides, she believed, the “character actor” can be an artist, “like a painter with a very large palette of colors from which to paint an interesting picture with dimension.”
The of a daughter of Massachusetts minister, she was born at the dawn of the 20th century and after some 155 acting roles, expired in 1974. By then she had established herself as the go-to working actress playing, as critic David Thomson puts it, “shrews, rancorous mothers, bitches and spinsters.”
She did this on radio, the stage, Hollywood and on television. Highly educated, “old fashioned” in her personal moral values — though she became known as one of Hollywood’s more discrete lesbians — Moorehead brought professional savvy, sophistication and sheer hard work to every character she portrayed.
As Thomson notes: What are the two most indelibly humane moments in the work of Orson Welles? There is a case for saying Agnes Moorehead figures in both. (Note to Thomson: she sure does. Case closed.)
Moorehead figures prominently in two of the most moving scenes in any of the films directed by Orson Welles. She (as pictured below) is unforgettable as Charles Foster Kane’s mother in 1941’s Citizen Kane. (She was just 35 years old at the time.) And she really pulls out the stops as Aunt Fanny in the director’s second outing, 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons, for which she nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar.
Welles in many ways was Moorehead’s professional sponsor. The two met during their respective radio days. “I was with him 17 years,” she recalled. Welles was the one who brought Moorehead — she was a member of his Mercury players — to Hollywood. If a strange part came up, Welles would intone: “Give it to Agnes. She can play it.”
Considering her straight-laced New England background and her education, Moorehead’s Hollywood friends included at least one surprising name, Debbie Reynolds. The perky musical comedy star and Moorehead developed an “extremely close relationship” dating back to 1962’s How The West Was Won. Reynolds played one of Moorehead’s two daughters. The other was played by Carroll Baker, who was agreeable enough but never really became Moorehead’s friend.
Moorehead had something in common with Susan Hayward, John Wayne and Dick Powell. All died of of various forms of cancer believed to be connected to radiation exposure on the Saint George, Utah location of 1955’s The Conqueror.
The town was near an above-ground atomic test blast site in the adjacent Nevada desert, heavily used during the Fifties. Wayne, Hayward and Moorehead were in the cast. Moorehead died in 1974 at 73 of uterine cancer. Powell, who died of cancer of the lymph glands in 1963, directed the movie.
AGNES MOOREHEAD… No relation of course to Holly Goodhead from the James Bond MOONRAKER, but certainly an actress who could play the femme fatale so well as in DARK PASSAGE with Humphrey Bogart.
Being a real pro, she could be equally engaging as the sweet Sister Frances in an episode of TV’s RAWHIDE, and Sister Cluny alongside her friend Debbie Reynolds in THE SINGING NUN.
And then… We come to that highly suspect movie that saw the deaths of some many HOLLYWOOD stars, which I detailed in one of my many articles. Here is but a small exerpt…
Sometimes referred to as an “RKO Radioactive Picture,” virtually everything associated with THE CONQUEROR was an unmitigated disaster. But most disastrous was the choice to shoot on location in the Escalante Desert near St George, Utah, downwind from the Nevada Test Site where the government had conducted Operation Upshot-Knothole in 1953, only a year earlier. There were other problems too: Susan Hayward’s black panther attacked her, Pedro Armendáriz’s horse threw him, breaking his jaw, a flash flood nearly wiped out production and sweltering 120° heat made the fur costumes unbearable. Yet these fade into insignificance compared to the acutely radioactive sand of Snow Canyon, into which clouds of fallout from eleven above ground nuclear tests in Nevada had funneled, exposing the filmmakers for thirteen full weeks, between mid-May and August of 1954. You might think that this situation couldn’t have been made any worse, but Hughes shipped sixty tons of this radioactive Utah dirt back to Hollywood to give retakes authenticity.
The production numbered 220 cast and crew on location. By 1981, 91 of them had contracted a form of cancer and 46 were already dead of the disease, including many of the key players: John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead all died of cancer in the seventies, director Dick Powell in 1963 and Pedro Armendáriz the same year, by shooting himself in the heart to bypass suffering from terminal cancer. There was no record kept of the hundreds of Shivwits Indian extras on the picture, but half the residents of St George had contracted the disease by this time, and eventually, over half the cast and crew would too. While it has never conclusively been proved that the tests were a factor in these deaths and many victims smoked heavily, including the Duke, who survived lung cancer in 1964 before succumbing to stomach cancer in 1979, it’s still likely, given a statistical anomaly of instances over three times higher than would usually be expected and wide variance in these instances, not restricted to lung cancer in the slightest.
Howard Hughes had a knack for making money so strong that it could almost be called a Midas touch, but occasionally even he lost it. THE CONQUEROR was a rare financial flop for him, though it did tie REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE for the 11th place in box office rentals in 1956, earning $4.5m. The catch is that it cost $6m to make and, apparently feeling guilty over some of the decisions made during production that may have cost the lives of many of his cast and crew, he shelled out $12m more to buy back every print of the film. After initial release, nobody saw The CONQUEROR except Howard Hughes himself until 1974, when he allowed it to be broadcast on television.
How ironic, that in the year that the Duke’s most acclaimed film, THE SEARCHERS, was released in 1956, was also the year that saw his worst movie. With Wayne as the industry’s biggest star, topping Quigley’s list of all time money makers, it must have been a personal favor to his friend Howard Hughes to accept such a miscast part, with such a mediocre script. Certainly, he was serious about the rôle once it was his, going on a crash diet that included Dexedrine four times a day.
The approximately 100,000 people who lived in the three-state fallout zone north and east of the testing site are more likely to have been affected than the Hollywood visitors. For years they inhaled contaminated dust and ingested contaminated food and milk. In the early 1960s, multiple cases of childhood leukemia and adult cancers began to appear, a shocking novelty because Mormons, who shun alcohol and tobacco, typically have low cancer rates. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1984 compared those in the fallout area with other Mormons and found leukemia levels five times higher.
Government denials about any cancer-causing fallout unraveled in the 1980’s, when lawsuits uncovered internal AEC reports showing scientists and bureaucrats downplayed and distorted evidence. Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, establishing a fund for Down-winders with cancer and serious illnesses apparently linked to above-ground nuclear weapons testing. Compensation is capped at $50,000 per person.
A People magazine article in 1980 reported that no bombs were tested during the filming, but the article quoted Robert Pendleton, director of radiological health at the University of Utah, saying radioactivity from previous blasts probably lodged in Snow Canyon. It also attributed an immortal quote to a scientist from the Pentagon’s defense nuclear agency: “Please, God, don’t let us have killed John Wayne.”