Want to know the best Agnes Moorehead movies? How about the worst Agnes Moorehead movies? Curious about Agnes Moorehead box office grosses or which Agnes Moorehead movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Agnes Moorehead movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which ones got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place…. because we have all of that information and much more.
Agnes Moorehead (1900-1974) was a 4 time Oscar® nominated American actress. Her six-decade career included work in radio, stage, film, and television. Her most notable film roles were in Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, All That Heaven Allows, Show Boat, and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Growing up we only knew her as Endora on the television series Bewitched.….we were completely clueless that she had put together one fine movie career.
Her IMDb page shows 116 acting credits from 1941-1974. This page will rank 63 Agnes Moorehead movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television appearances, shorts, and bit parts were not included in the rankings.
Agnes Moorehead Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Agnes Moorehead movies by movie titles and trailers to those movies
- Sort Agnes Moorehead movies by co-stars of her movies
- Sort Agnes Moorehead movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Agnes Moorehead movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Agnes Moorehead movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Agnes Moorehead movie received.
- Sort by how many Oscar® wins each Agnes Moorehead movie received.
- Sort Agnes Moorehead movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Agnes Moorehead Table
- Twenty-eight Agnes Moorehead movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 44.44% of her movies listed. How the West Was Won (1962) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Agnes Moorehead movie grosses $114.10 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 40 Agnes Moorehead movies are rated as good movies…or 63.49% of her movies. Citizen Kane (1941) was her highest rated movie while The Conqueror (1956) was her lowest rated movie.
- Nineteen Agnes Moorehead movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 30.15% of her movies.
- Five Agnes Moorehead movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 7.93% of her movies.
- A “good movie” Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 60.00. 43 Agnes Moorehead movies scored higher that average….or 68.25% of her movies. How the West Was Won (1962) got the the highest UMR Movie Score while The Story of Mankind (1957) got the lowest UMR Movie Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Agnes Moorehead
1. Agnes Robertson Moorehead was born in Clinton, Massachusetts in 1900.
2. Agnes Moorehead’s big break was meeting Orson Welles. By 1937 she was one of his principal Mercury Players, along with Joseph Cotten.
3. 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 1941’s Citizen Kane, which is considered one of the best films ever made.
4. Agnes Moorehead was the first woman to host the Academy Awards®. She and Dick Powell were co-hosts in 1948.
5. Agnes Moorehead was one of the cast members of the ill-fated film The Conqueror (1956), which was filmed in 1954 in the Nevada desert close by to where the government was doing nuclear testing. In later years, those tests were suspected to have caused the cancer deaths of several of the films stars including John Wayne, Dick Powell, Susan Hayward and Pedro Armendáriz.
6. Agnes Moorehead initially turned down the role of Endora in Bewitched (1964), but reconsidered when Elizabeth Montgomery asked her in person, when they met in a department store. Moorehead joined the cast not expecting the series to last more than one season, let alone become a long-running hit.
7. Agnes Moorehead was married two times in her life. She did not have any children….though at one time she did adopt a child….but he ran away….and there are questions regarding the legality of the adoption.
8. Agnes Moorehead was Joan Crawford’s favorite actress.
9. Agnes Moorehead appeared in five Oscar® Best Picture nominees; Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Since You Went Away (1944), Johnny Belinda (1948) and How the West Was Won (1962). She earned 4 Best Supporting Actress Oscar® nominations.
10. Check out Agnes Moorehead’s movie career compared to current and classic stars on our Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time page.
It is difficult to believe that the Moderator of this far-reaching and highly perceptive movies site has NEVER seen arguably the two greatest back-to-back weepies in movie history that boasted the same male and female leads, director and supporting actress.
One cannot help feeling that had Magnificent Obsession and All that Heaven Allows starred Cary and Myrna instead of Rock and Jane, been directed by Hawks and featured Margot Robbie as a supporting actress The Work Horse would have seen the two movies as often as Howard Hughes is said to have watched Wayne’s The Conqueror and Rock’s Ice Station Zebra.
What makes the situation harder to fathom is that according to a 12.14 post on March 9 2018 on this page The Great Man himself awarded four stars for each of Mooerhead’s performances in those films. Accordingly for WH to decline to watch that pair of classics is a bit like Moses refusing to obey one of the Ten Commandments. Thank goodness that the Cogerson Boy has a mother with good tastes.
Moreover Magnificent Obsession [rated a fine 78% on this site] was declared by one public popularity poll to be the “greatest weepie of all time” and the two versions of the movie made major stars of Robert Taylor in 1935 and Rock Hudson again in 1954. Indeed Sirk seems to have been to Hudson what Ford was to Wayne, Douglas putting Rock in several of his films.
All that Heaven Allows is regarded by many movie historians as a landmark film that provided perceptive social commentary on small-town America of the 1950s and the Cogerson site broadly reflects it’s value by awarding it an excellent 84% rating. Indeed its observations were so biting in parts that its expose of the at times hypocritical values of some elements of the rural American society of yesteryear as Sirk saw them that it’s a wonder that John Wayne didn’t campaign to have Douglas run out of town!
There is an excellent Douglas Sirk box set of CDs which includes not just these two great films but several others of Sirk’s classics, such as Imitation of Life and Written on the Wind, awarded 80% and 78% respectively on Cogerson.. It would make an excellent Thanksgiving or Christmas present for some husband/dad/stepdad/son. Hint! Hint! Hint!
HI LUPINO
I very much enjoyed your appraisal of the work of Agnes Moorehead and noticed that with your description of Agnes as the “good or not so good friend” of Jane Wyman in the two Douglas Sirk movies you have reflected how Agnes’ friendship for Jane differed to some extent between the two movies.
In Magnificent Obsession Agnes was the 100% stalwart, admiring friend whereas in All that Heaven Allows she was judgemental and wobbled slightly in the friendship. However she quickly caught herself on and staunchly rallied to Jane’s cause giving Wymanr the necessary support in the controversial lifestyle [for the times and in that kind of society] that Jane had chosen for herself.
For me Agnes was like Thelma Ritter one of Old Hollywood’s great character actresses, though Agnes at least when I saw them both tended to play more sophisticated characters than did Thelma and Moorehead probably had the broader acting range. I need to watch what I say on this site about Thelma though because I think that Bruce is a great Ritter fan, though these days he seems preoccupied more with promoting the career of Gabby Hayes among supporting performers. [One “can lead a Horse to water but one cannot make it drink!”]
Anyway Agnes in a way reminds me of Judith Anderson who played Mrs Danvers in Hitch’s 1940 Rebecca and I always thought that Moorehead would have been ideal for that role.
Hello Bob,
another late (and thus all the more welcome) reply to my old post on Aggie Moorehead. I agree with you on her status as a great character actress- just like Thelma Ritter- but while Ritter always played people coming distinctly from the working class, Moorehead more often than not played “society or upper middleclass women” with a high strung personalty…a luxury that Ritter’s characters couldn’t affort. I also agree with your comment on Moorehead having been a great Mrs. Danvers…yet I must admit that I have always been quite happy with Judith Anderson’s sinister portrayal ;O)
A word about Douglas Sirk- it seems to me that you- like me- see more in his better movies than just “women’s pictures” or “wheepies”, but also an astute commentary of the american society of his time. This is especially true for All That Heaven Allows, and I am sure I mentioned it before somewhere, but I don’t mind saying again that prolific german film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was an admirer of Sirk and “remade” Heaven as “Angst essen Seele auf” (Fear eats up soul), stripping it of all the technicolor and star glamour, turning the Wyman character into an elderly cleaning woman (great part for Thelma!) while Rock Hudson was turned into a much younger asylee. But the essence of what Sirk had been saying about society in his film remained the same…just updated and fit to german society of the 70’s.
HI LUPINO
Some more good analysis in your reply to me and I concur with what you say
Back in his day many observers made the mistake of treating Sirk’s movies as just weepies and women’s pictures but many historians now value them for their social commentary and because of the latter I have always loved All that Heaven Allows in particular.
Also let’s not forget that Sirk’s main protégé could be said to be Rock Hudson with whom Douglas made 8 movies whereas George Cukor who was regarded as a woman’s director in his time appears to have gravitated more towards his female stars.
I didn’t know about the German remake of All that Heaven Allows so thank you for sharing that information with me.
Hi Bruce,
Didn’t expect a reply to this old post of mine ? Is there hope for others? (Just kidding, I more often than not just read instead of commenting due to lack of time..or energy). Anyway,hols are almost over, last evening here in beautiful Portugal ?
The last week was spent on the breathtaking Algarve and although the weather wasn’t as good as I expected, we had some lazy beachdays amongst days of clouds, wind and even rain. Today the clouds broke up early afternoon and I at least did some serious tanning and swimming on a very long and, after some walking, quiet beach. Strange, but the only thing I’m missing on holidays like these is the fact that there are no movies to be watched…talk about complaining on a very high level ? Back to work on Monday, so maybe there’s a chance to go and see Jurrassic World before!
Hello Lupino,
Back to work on monday, bad news , but in the mean time that s the only way to appreciate holidays and week end;
Have a good time for the last days and hope you see the Dino but dont forget to run before because it is the only way to survive in that films;
Bye
Pierre
Hi Pierre,
Thank you for your concern ?I promise I will run ?♂️ as soon as the raptor jumps out of the screen and into the audience! Although…didn’t I always want to pet a dino? ?
Giving the fantastic Miss Moorehead one more try 🙂
She more often than not played shrewish parts (Dark Passage), but she was also able to portray outwardly hardened women with a very soft core (Johnny Belinda), the good or not so good friend (to Jane Wyman in their Douglas Sirk movies, for example), the grumpy old “broad” with a heart of gold (Pollyanna) or the frontier woman (How the West was Won). Then,of course, there were her parts in Orson Welles movies. Moorehead was a very competent actress, but she could also chew up the scenery with the best of them. Her performance in Hush, Hush sweet Charlotte made Bette Davis’ over the top portrayal of the title character look like a masterclass in refined, subtle acting…but it was so entertaining that one did wish for more than Moorehead’s limited screentime allowed. Another fav Moorehead performance of mine is in The Lost Moment, although BOB’s busom body doesn’t seem to agree on that one.
I have never been a big fan of Bewitched, only saw a few episodes (I’m a Barbara Eden man, I guess, for I’ve seen all episodes of I dream of Jeannie), but I am a big fan of Miss Moorehead’s radio performances- and her original performance in Sorry, wrong Number is just a starting point for so much more to discover.
I hope the post gets through this time…and I really hope that those issues troubeling Team Cogerson for so many days now will soon be solved!
Hey Lupino…..sorry you had some many issues getting this comment done. Luckily many of these tech issues have been resolved. Excellent breakdown on Agnes Moorehead and her movie career. I like your comparison to Bette Davis in Hush Hush. I liked I Dream of Jeannie more as well….but had a crush on both Eden and Elizabeth Montgomery. Good feedback…sorry it took so long to respond…..the tech issues back then really frustrated me and took all of my time. Actually….we never did our yearly March Madness Movie Tournament…because mainly so much stuff was broken on the website.