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Six terrible movie mothers.

By Matt Prigge

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jun. 11, 2008

Savage Grace

Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate (1962): What kind of terrible mother volunteers her son's own troop to be brainwashed into assassins by the Red Chinese? Upping the Oedipal factor is the fact that Lansbury was only three years older than movie son Laurence Harvey. Also, she's Angela Lansbury.

Shelley Winters, A Patch of Blue (1965): Three years after playing the shrill mama in Lolita (and eight years before the villain "Mommy" in Cleopatra Jones), Winters scored an Oscar for her turn in this sensitive, comically earnest drama, playing a harridan who first blinds her willowy daughter (Elizabeth Hartman), then erupts into an unprecedented racist fury when she starts seeing Sidney Poitier.

Bette Davis, The Anniversary (1968): Well into her late-period scream-queen era, Bette Davis strapped on an array of different colored eye patches to headline this campy Hammer Films production as the world's most possessive materfamilias. To lavishly celebrate her wedding anniversary, the happily widowed Davis amasses her three sons, including a transvestite and another who simply wants to move away. At one point she tells one that his children have just been killed in a car accident. Later she hides her glass eye underneath another's pillow.

Faye Dunaway, Mommie Dearest (1981): Say no more.

Asia Argento, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004): JT LeRoy's harrowing memoirs of his (correction: her) childhood were revealed as a hilariously elaborate hoax by the time this gruesome film adaptation hit American theaters. Not that it could ever have been mistaken for reality. Played by the Italian actress and exhibitionist (who also directed), the boy's prostitute mother combines the worst traits of every bad fiction mom, including hooking her son on drugs, dressing him in drag, telling him she wanted him aborted, exposing him to a pederast played by Marilyn Manson and feeding him Spaghetti-O's.

Julianne Moore, Savage Grace (2008): In which Moore makes a valiant effort to usurp the corpse of Norman Bates' mother as cinema's worst mama's-boy mama.