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TCM Birthday Tribute: Agnes Moorehead
TCM, Beginning at 3:30 a.m.
Acclaimed actress Agnes Moorehead would have turned 121 today (she was born Dec. 6, 1900; she passed away at age 73 on April 30, 1974). In commemoration of her birth, Turner Classic Movies is airing a morning and afternoon of some of her most memorable film performances, many of which were in supporting, but still impactful, roles. The day fittingly begins with the actress’s feature film debut, in co-writer/director/producer/ star Orson Welles’ iconic, Oscar-winning Citizen Kane (pictured) (1941). Moorehead, along with other actors in the film, had been a member of Welles’ famed Mercury Players, and she had notably costarred with Welles in The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio program The Shadow. In Citizen Kane, Moorehead portrays Mary Kane, mother of Welles’ title character, Charles Foster Kane. Next, in the drama Scandal at Scourie (1953), Moorehead has a supporting role as a sympathetic nun in a story about controversy that arises in a small Canadian town when a Protestant couple tries to adopt a Catholic child. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon lead the cast. Following that, Moorehead has a smaller role as a pawnbroker in the 1949 drama The Great Sinner, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Frank Morgan, Ethel Barrymore, Walter Huston and Melvyn Douglas. Moorehead reteams with writer/ director Welles in today’s next movie, which was her second feature film: the Best Picture Oscar-nominated The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The drama is based on Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and earned Moorehead her first Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, portraying Fanny Minafer. Up next, Moorehead has a darker, femme fatale-type role when she costars with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Bruce Bennett in the mystery thriller Dark Passage (1947). Moorehead plays a more sympathetic character in today’s next title, the film noir Caged (1950), one of the earliest “women-in-prison” movies, where she portrays reformist prison superintendent Ruth Benton. The Moorehead birthday celebration concludes with Johnny Belinda (1948), the Best Picture Oscar-nominated drama that earned the actress her third Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, as Aggie Macdonald, aunt to the film’s deafmute main character, Belinda Macdonald (Best Actress Oscar winner Jane Wyman).