Agnes Moorehead's performance

I think she was playing a certain kind of character in a certain kind of film,and it works.
"Forget it Jake,It's Chinatown."

Well, seeing that we have never seen any of Crawford's scenes, we'll never know.

But comparing Velma to Elvira is really not fair. Two different kinds of people with different backgrounds and mentalities. It's obvious that Velma is sort of "slow", and actually poor white trash. Elvira, despite her ethnic background, is a more grounded well spoken and intelligent woman, which is something I applaud Maidie Norman for because she woudn't play stereotype and it actually worked for the movie too because Elvira was needed as the character to "stand up" to Jane and be a threat to her. Velma's stupidity actually got her killed where Elvira's tenacity got her killed because she thought that she had threatened Jane enough that Jane would back down.

Swing away, Merrill....Merrill, swing away...

I loved her in this, and thought she was as good as anyone she was up against. She was up against Lila Kedrova, who won for Zorba the Greek, Gladys Cooper for My Fair Lady, Edith Evans for the The Chalk Garden,and Grayson Hall for The Night of the Iguana. Aside from My Fair Lady, most of those films are pretty much forgotten, if you ask me. Especially The Chalk Garden. That one is really obscure now.

To me, her best work, however, was always the episode she did of the Twilight Zone.

Agnes Moorehead was a brilliant actress and she gave a brilliant performance in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. The character of Velma is over the top, and Agnes captured that perfectly.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

'but she overacts in this film quite a lot and quite terribly compared to Maidie Norman in Baby Jane what a difference.'

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I find ths trend today(esp, among younger viewers to cite overacting. Her role was supposed to be overstated--not to be confused with overacting. That is WHO the character was. And she showed different levels in her performance also.

Today, there all this damn kudos for "oh bravo, so understated". Undestatement is also used by some actors because they couldn't get away with not being "understated" due to lack of talent. Not everything in life is understated.
(Madie Norman was not understated either).

It's a unique and brave performance, Agnes played her daringly coarse but there are people in the world this crude. I'm glad to see her work was appreciated by the various awards and nominations because I can see the arguement she went too far even though I don't think she did.

The one thing that kind of jars me is Velma's comments about Charlotte promising her this or that after she passes away given Agnes is clearly older than Bette, not in bad health or anything so why would she even mention something like that. Makes me wonder if perhaps the role was initially written for a younger woman.

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i've known people who act exactly like she does. her performance is not over the top at all -- she knew what she was doing.