1900-1974
{Descended from immigrant, Samuel Moorehead (1745-1814) and Elizabeth Sproul.}
Actress.

  Agnes Moorehead was born on 06 December 1900 at Clinton, Massachusetts.(7.48) Agnes was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, John Henderson Moorehead and Mary Mildred McCauley. She had two sisters, Marion and Anna. As the Reverend Moorehead’s pastoral assignments changed, the family moved often. They lived for a time at Hamilton, Ohio, and later at St. Louis, Missouri.

  Agnes was destined to become an actress. It is believed that Agnes began ‘acting’ at the age of three. While attending high school, Agnes participated in the ballet and chorus of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company and was considered a professional ballet dancer at the age of eleven. She considered taking up a career in acting, but after graduating from high school, she instead enrolled in courses under a biology major at the Muskingum College at New Concord, Ohio, a Presbyterian college founded by Agnes’ uncle. She graduated in 1923, and then went on to the University of Wisconsin to get her master’s degree in English and public speaking. While atteding the University of Wisconsin, Agnes worked as a high school English teacher and drama coach. Attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts at New York City was next for Agnes. She started there in 1926 and graduated with honors in 1929. She began her theatrical career by touring with various companies, but the Depression of the 1930s had a detrimental effect on job opportunities in the theater. So Agnes temporarily put aside her aspirations to be an actress and took up work in radio, providing voices for a number of characters in a variety of radio shows.

Agnes Moorehead
~ From the website, The Bone Orchard at Brian’s Drive-In Theater, by Brian J. Walker
~ http://www.briansdriveintheater.com

  Agnes Moorehead married John Griffith Lee in June, 1930. He was a fellow student actor at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His acting career did not take off as he wished, and so, he took up managing the Moorehead family farm in Ohio.

Agnes Moorehead
~ From the website, The Bone Orchard at Brian’s Drive-In Theater, by Brian J. Walker
~ http://www.briansdriveintheater.com

  Agnes met actor, Orson Welles while doing radio shows, and the two of them along with Joseph Cotton, formed the Mercury Players. Welles made the decision to head to Hollywood and try to make it as a movie actor. He called for Agnes to join him in the movie, Citizen Kane. She played Kane’s mother, and from there went on to star in many movies, including Welles’ Jane Eyre, Journey Into Fear and Magnificent Amberson’s. She appeared in over sixty films over a thirty-year period. In 1950 Agnes was cast in Paul Gregory’s stage production of Shaw’s Don Juan In Hell, with Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Agnes tried her hand at directing with this play. The show played to sold-out audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Later, during the early 1950s, Agnes began appearing in television shows. One appearance, in the “Night of the Vicious Valentine” episode of the Wild Wild West earned her an Emmy. Perhaps her best known role was as Endora, the ‘meddling’ mother of Samantha in Bewitched.

Agnes Moorehead as Endora
~ From the website, The Bone Orchard at Brian’s Drive-In Theater, by Brian J. Walker
~ http://www.briansdriveintheater.com

  Over the years, Agnes would travel to the farm in Ohio to be with her husband. But they grew estranged, and in 1952 she filed for divorce, claiming that Lee simply thought of her as a ‘meal ticket.’ In 1953 Agnes married Robert Gist. They separated in 1954 and eventually got divorced in 1958. Agnes’ bad luck with her husbands and her circumspect attitude toward talking about her private life opened the door for critics and the Hollywood gossip-mongers to make claims that she was homosexual.

  Agnes Moorehead died on 30 April 1974 at Rochester, Minnesota, as a result of lung cancer.