Agnes Moorehead
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| Agnes Moorehead | ||
 Agnes Mooreheaad | ||
| Background information | ||
| Born | Dec 6, 1900 | |
| Birth place: | Clinton, MA USA | |
| Born as | Agnes Robertson Moorehead | |
| Died | Apr 30, 1974 - age 74 | |
| Rochester, MN USA | ||
| Occupation | Actress | |
| Years active | 1937–1974 | |
| Spouse(s) | Jack G. Lee (1930-1952) Robert Gist (1954-1958) | |
Agnes Robertson Moorehead (✦December 6, 1900 - †April 30, 1974) was an American actress. Although she began with the Mercury Theatre, appeared in more than seventy films beginning with Citizen Kane (with Orson Welles) and on dozens of television shows during a career that spanned more than thirty years, Moorehead is most widely known to modern audiences for her role as the witch Endora in the television series Bewitched.
While rarely playing leads in films, Moorehead's skill at character development and range earned her one Emmy Award and two Golden Globe awards in addition to four Academy Award and six Emmy Award nominations. Moorehead's transition to television won acclaim for drama and comedy. She could play many different types, but often portrayed haughty, arrogant characters.
Private life
Moorehead married actor John Griffith Lee in 1930, and they divorced in 1952. Moorehead and Lee adopted an orphan named Sean in 1949, but it remains unclear whether the adoption was legal, although Moorehead did raise the child until he ran away from home. In 1954, she married actor Robert Gist, and they divorced in 1958. In the years since her death, rumors about Moorehead's being a lesbian have been widespread, most notoriously in the book Hollywood Lesbians by Boze Hadleigh, whose source for the allegation was Paul Lynde. However, Moorehead biographer Charles Tranberg (I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead, 2005) interviewed several of the actress's closest friends, including some who are openly gay, who all stated the rumor is untrue. Debbie Reynolds explicitly denied to film historian Robert Osborne that her "best friend" Moorehead was gay.
Moorehead was a devout Presbyterian (Reynolds described her as "terribly religious") and, in interviews, often spoke of her relationship with God. Erin Murphy stated that the actress would read Bible stories to the children affiliated with Bewitched. In one of her last films, What's the Matter with Helen? (1971, costarring Reynolds), she played an evangelist. Shortly before her death, Moorehead, who embraced her Reformed Calvinist roots, sought conservative causes to benefit after her death through her estate.
Death
Moorehead died of at the age of seventy-three in Rochester, Minnesota.
She appeared in the 1956 movie The Conqueror with John Wayne, which was shot downwind from a nuclear test site and was one of over 90 cast and crew members to contract cancer out of the 220 who worked on the picture. She is entombed at Dayton Memorial Park in Dayton, Ohio.
Moorehead bequeathed her 1967 Emmy Award statue for The Wild Wild West, her private papers, and her home in Rix Mills, Ohio, to her alma mater Muskingum College. She left her family's Ohio estate and farmlands, Moorehead Manor, to Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, as well as some biblical studies books from her personal library. Her will stipulated that BJU should use the farm for retreats and special meetings "with a Christian emphasis", but the distance of the estate from the South Carolina campus rendered it mostly useless. In May 1976, BJU traded the Moorehead farmlands with an Ohio college for $25,000 and a collection of her library books. Moorehead also left her professional papers, scripts, Christmas cards and scrapbooks to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
In 1994, Moorehead was posthumously inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
External links
- 35 Fabulous Photos of Agnes Moorehead in the 1930s and ’40s
- The Children of John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Dick Powell Fear That Fallout Killed Their Parents
See also Saint George
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