Agnes Robertson Moorehead (December 6, 1900 – April 30, 1974) was an American character actress. She was born in Clinton, Massachusetts of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestry, the only child of a Presbyterian minister. She later shaved 6 years off her age by claiming to have been born in 1906. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.

Moorehead was a graduate of Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. She was also part of Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on the Air radio program in the 1930s and appeared in a Broadway production of Don Juan in Hell in 1950.

While never a headlining star in films, Mooreheads skill at character development and range earned her one Emmy, two Golden Globes, and four Oscar nominations and six Emmy nominations. She won the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress in 1942 for the role of Fannie in The Magnificent Amberson. Moorehead transitioned to television, and again won acclaim and accolades for her work in drama and in comedy.

Moorehead died in Rochester, Minnesota from uterine cancer, at the age of 73. [1] While never confirmed, some suspect that Moorehead’s cancer was a result of having been exposed to radiation while filming The Conqueror in Utah, at a site previously used for nuclear testing. Moorehead believed her cancer was related to this exposure, and commented in an interview shortly before her death, "I wish I'd never done that damn movie". The director Dick Powell and co-stars John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Pedro Armendariz also died from cancer, and Dr Robert Pendleton, Professor of Biology at the University of Utah, has described the incidence of cancer among cast and crew of The Conqueror as an "epidemic".
Noting that 91 members of the cast and crew had contracted cancer by 1984, with more than half of them dying, Dr Pendleton stated "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law." [2]
Though widely believed to be a lesbian, Moorehead married actor John Griffith Lee in 1930 and they divorced in 1952; they adopted one son, 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 1953, she married actor Robert Gist, and they later divorced in 1958. The actress was also a devout Presbyterian and, in interviews, often spoke of her relationship with God.

Moorehead willed her 1965 Emmy for The Wild, Wild West, her Oscar nominations and her private papers to Muskingum College, including her home in Rix Mills, Ohio.
She is interred at Dayton Memorial Park in Dayton, Ohio.

I'm following Sean around today with this one:
Mon, December 5, 2005 - 9:43 PM
Happy Birthday Aggie!!
My cousin Agnes is possibly the most recognizable character actress in the world and yet most folks know nothing about her. There's are reason for that...she wanted it that way. There was Agnes Moorehead the character actress and Aggie Moorehead the person. What everyone knows is exactly what she wanted you to know. I'm not going to divulge any family secrets or set any skeletons loose from a closet, no pun intended, but I am going to tell you as much as I know about her. Anyone who tries to tell you they knew exactly what Agnes was like, well they didn't know her at all. I have come to believe that she was something different to everyone who knew her or even just saw her. I will tell you what she could be. She could be exasperating especially when flinging logic around. She could forgive almost anyone for anything but she could never forgive herself for anything. She was a perfectionist when it came to herself...she wanted always to be the best that she could be at what she was doing. She was a very talented artist. She had a wicked sense of humor and was so dry sometimes you wondered if she was trying to be funny until you saw the look in her eyes...then you knew it was a joke. She had an outrageous laugh. She was very strict and yet somehow at the same time compassionate. She loved pigs...she loved animals period. She was an excellent swimmer. She was an excellent dancer. Contrary to what you've been told she did smoke when she was younger, usually Lucky Strikes but not a heavy smoker. She had a beautiful singing voice. I suppose you'd call her taste ecclectic...truely. She was a shop a holic and had more soap than you could use in a year...she loved fancy soaps. She loved apples. She loved books. She wore glasses. She played the piano. If you really wanted to know what she was feeling all you had to do was look at her eyes...it was the one place she never learned to hide her emotions. When she got started talking about something she was passionate about she could talk the balls off a pool table. She was a pack rat...but never sloppy. She kept everything... Endora was a whole lot of Agnes with a small amount of acting thrown in for good measure. She liked champagne. Christmas was one of her favorite holidays. She was kind, generous, warm, reserved, bitchy, in a good way, outgoing, reserved, dramatic, understated, loud, quiet, caring, cold, strong and frightened all at the same time. She always smelled fabulous. She was an excellent horse woman and loved horses. She had one named Endora. Parma violets were her favorite flower and anything purple, lavendar or mauve got her immediate attention. She was a woman of contridictions, so complex that Freud would have needed two lifetimes to analyze her..but the truth is she would never have let him near her. She was so intelligent that she knew exactly who she was and who you were. She could size up people in a heartbeat. She was without peer. She could have been anything she wanted to be but she was exactly what she wanted to be. She had higher moral standards than the Pope and was very distressed at the state of the worlds morals. You could not have been near her without loving her just a little. She said what she thought. She did what she thought was right. Her solitary nature was protection for her from a world that she knew could never comprehend her or might pass judgement on her without considering who she was, really. The woman on the television either in a show or in a movie, the woman on the radio or in a recording..that is Agnes Moorehead the character actress...that is who she wanted you to know but the woman taking a walk in the woods, as she put it "listening to the silence," with her book and her apple trying to find a place to sit down to read...that is Aggie, just Aggie.