Agnes Moorehead (Portrait Treatment) 2010

1. Moorehead was born in Clinton, Massachusetts, of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestry, to a Presbyterian clergyman, John Henderson Moorehead, and his wife, the former Mildred McCauley, who had been a singer. Moorehead later shaved six years off her age by claiming to have been born in 1906.

2. The Moorehead family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and Moorehead's ambition to become an actress grew "very strong". She joined the chorus of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company, known as "The Muny" and graduated from Central High School in St. Louis in 1918.*

3. Moorehead's early career was unsteady, and although she was able to find stage work she was often unemployed and forced to go hungry. She later recalled going four days without food, and said that it had taught her "the value of a dollar." She found work in radio and was soon in demand. She met Orson Welles and by 1937 was a member of his Mercury Theatre Group. She appeared in his radio production Julius Caesar, had a regular role in the serial The Shadow as Margo and was one of the players in his The War of the Worlds production. In 1939, Welles moved the Mercury Theatre Group to Hollywood, where he started working for RKO Studios. Several of his radio performers joined him, and Moorehead made her film debut as his mother in Citizen Kane (1941).

4. Moorehead died of uterine cancer at the age of seventy-three in Rochester, Minnesota. She appeared in the 1956 movie The Conqueror, 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.

5. 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.


*In 1994, Moorehead was posthumously inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.