Agnes Moorehead

Agnes Moorehead was a preacher's daughter from Massachusetts, classically trained and radio-hardened, when she fell in with Orson Welles and John Houseman's Mercury Theatre in the late 1930s. That association changed American acting. On the airwaves she was one of the most versatile voices in the medium, and in the title role of the radio thriller "Sorry, Wrong Number" she gave a study in mounting hysteria so famous it was repeated many times by popular demand.

Welles brought his players west, and Moorehead made her film debut as the cold, dying mother in "Citizen Kane" (1941), the woman who signs her boy away in the snow. A year later she delivered the performance that should have made her a legend outright: Aunt Fanny in "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942), a repressed, love-starved spinster whose disintegration by a boarding-house radiator is one of the most painful things in American film. It earned the first of her four Academy Award nominations.

She was never conventionally glamorous and never wanted the roles that required it. Instead she specialized in intensity: the loyal servant in "Johnny Belinda" (1948), the neighborly gossip in Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows" (1955), the shrieking, doomed housekeeper of "Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1964). Red-haired and imperious, she could suggest a lifetime of thwarted feeling with a clenched jaw.

To a mass audience she is best remembered, somewhat unfairly, as Endora, the witch mother-in-law on the sitcom "Bewitched," a role she played with such arch relish across the 1960s that it won her a devoted following and several Emmy nominations. She regarded television with some ambivalence but never condescended to it.

Moorehead died of uterine cancer in 1974, still working. She left behind no starring vehicles to define her, only a gallery of unforgettable women at the edges of other people's stories, each one fully imagined. Among actors she remains a byword for craft: proof that a great supporting player can be the reason a film endures.