10 memorable movie mothers

“The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” wrote William Ross Wallace in a poem that extolled the greatness of moms. Like most things involving moms, however, that sentiment feels a little loaded. Our relationship with mothers is … complicated.

We love them, but fear them, too––particularly when they use your middle name and get that tone of voice, you know the one. Because cinema reflects us, the movies have long been all over the map with mothers. They are saints and monsters, martyrs and narcissists, tyrants and protectors. They’re doling out sage advice one minute and coming at you with a butcher knife the next. The one thing movie moms rarely get to be is ordinary.

So, yeah, perhaps the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world, but what sort of power-mad lunatic thinks that way? Can’t rocking the cradle simply be its own reward? It’s not for nothing that Wallace’s seemingly feel-good line became the title of a film about a psychopathic mama. These are my picks for 10 of the most memorable movie moms, in ascending order.

10. Inez de la Paz in A Thousand and One (2023, dir. A.V. Rockwell)

Writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s debut benefits mightily from Teyana Taylor’s ferocious, captivating performance as Inez. A troubled mother recently released from prison, she kidnaps her young son, Terry (played at different points in growth by Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Josiah Cross and Aven Courtney), from foster care, changes his name and begins life anew. Set in the New York of the mid-1990s, A Thousand and One is gritty and unsparingly honest. Rockwell keeps shifting the ground beneath us in unexpected ways, so the less one knows going in, the better.

9. Mrs. Lift in Throw Momma from the Train (1987, dir. Danny DeVito)

This barbed comic reworking of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train offers a momma so cranky, belittling and exceedingly unpleasant, it’s no wonder that her child wants her offed. In Throw Momma from the Train, Danny DeVito plays Owen, who gets it in his head that he and his creative writing instructor, Larry Donner (Billy Crystal), can swap murders: Owen’s merciless mother in exchange for the instructor’s hateful ex-wife. DeVito, who also directed, hit the motherlode when he cast Anne Ramsey as Mrs. Lift. Her Momma, half-cartoon and half-balled-up fist, has all the maternal love of a bowling ball. Larry tells Owen’s mother that her son doesn’t have friends because he’s shy. “No, he’s not!” she barks. “He’s fat and he’s stupid!” Ramsey earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She died of cancer less than a year later at age 59.

8.Mother (2009, dir. Bong Joon Ho)

No matter how much the titular mother in Bong Joon Ho’s Mother dotes on her developmentally disabled adult son, Yoon Do-Joon (Won Bin), the boy cannot seem to avoid trouble. Often led astray by his friend Jin-Tae (Jin Goo), Do-Joon drinks too much, stalks girls with short skirts, and loses his temper when taunted. But when he is charged with bludgeoning to death a high school girl (Moon Hee-ra) and leaving her body draped over a balcony for all the townsfolk to see, this South Korean mama bear lets her claws out. Confident her child isn’t the culprit, this mother, whom Kim Hye-Ja plays with ferocious maternal resolve, sets out to identify the real killer. If that means delving into the seamy underbelly of her town––or, say, bashing some brains in––so be it. A mother’s love knows no bounds, especially when said mother is holding a lead pipe.

7. Margaret White in Carrie (1976, dir. Brian De Palma)

Piper Laurie earned an Oscar nomination as the religious zealot of a mother to beleaguered Carrie White. Laurie had been retired from acting for close to 20 years when Brian De Palma approached her for the role; the script didn’t impress her until her husband, then-Newsweek film critic Joe Morgenstern, told her that De Palma typically wove humor into his pictures. That explained things for her. Laurie is deliciously over the top in Carrie as Margaret White. You can’t take your eyes off her, particularly in one of moviedom’s great death scenes. After Margaret tries killing Carrie for the unforgivable sin of attending Prom, the daughter uses her powers of telekinesis to send kitchen knives flying into her deranged mom. Laurie plays the scene as being ecstatic about joining the Lord. Indeed, Margaret’s moans are downright orgasmic. (See more in The 15 best school-centric films.)

6.  Cynthia Purley in Secrets & Lies (1996, dir. Mike Leigh)

London optometrist Hortense Cumberbatch (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), grieving the recent death of her adopted mother, consults a social services worker for information about the birth mother she has never known. Hortense, who is Black, is shocked to find that her birth mum, factory worker Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn), is white. Hortense reaches out. The emotional fallout is devastating. Secrets & Lies, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, examines the seismic impact of a secret revealed. Blethyn is spectacular, a creature of fear, fragility and self-pity. Already heartbroken that the 20-year-old daughter she lives with clearly despises her, Cynthia finds in Hortense a welcome opportunity to forge a healthy mother-daughter relationship––if only Cynthia can keep out of her own way. The scene where the two meet is an extraordinary feast of acting.
(See more in The 15 best films that explore class divides.)

5. Mama in I Remember Mama (1948, dir. George Stevens)

Irene Dunne is the perfect mother in this sentimental but effective adaptation of John Van Druten’s Broadway play that itself was based on a Kathryn Forbes memoir. Framed through the recollections of the eldest daughter (Barbara Bel Geddes), I Remember Mama revolves around a hardworking family of Norwegian immigrants in early 20th century San Francisco. Producer-director George Stevens initially wanted Greta Garbo for the role, but she passed, thankfully. It is difficult to envision the aloof Garbo as a matriarch so good-natured and full of homespun wisdom. Moreover, Dunne’s Norwegian accent isn’t half-bad. The performance earned her an Oscar nomination, but she lost to Jane Wyman for Johnny Belinda. Dunne later said Mama was her favorite role, and it’s easy to understand why. 

4. Eleanor Shaw Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962, dir. John Frankenheimer)

As cravenly ambitious Eleanor Shaw Iselin, Angela Lansbury makes for one of cinema’s most irresistibly wicked moms. What kind of mother would be part of a vast conspiracy that has transformed her son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) into a mindless assassin? John Frankenheimer was emphatic that Lansbury play Eleanor. “I’ve always had a problem playing just downright rotten women. Anything like that, I just can’t touch it,” the actress recalled in a 2004 documentary, Queen of Diamonds. But she couldn’t say no. To put it mildly, mother and son have a complicated relationship. She kisses him full on the mouth after apologizing to him, while he is in a fugue state, for how he has been used. “On the one hand, she (Eleanor) was going to use him and did in a disgraceful, dreadful way,” Lansbury said. “But when it came down to what had happened to him, she was devastated.” (See more in The 10 best conspiracy films.)

3. Manuela Echevarria in All About My Mother (1999, dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother trades in big, glorious melodrama reminiscent of the film All About Eve and the Tennessee Williams stage play A Streetcar Named Desire, both of which get prominently invoked here. At the center of it is Cecilia Roth as Manuela, an organ donation coordinator at a Madrid hospital whose life crashes when her son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín), is struck and killed by a car on his 17th birthday. Learning that the boy died wanting to know about his absent dad, Manuela heads to Barcelona to track down Esteban’s father, now a transgender woman named Lola. Over the course of the next six months, Manuela finds herself connecting with several women, including becoming a surrogate mother of sorts to a young nun with HIV (Penélope Cruz) who is pregnant with Lola’s child. Roth is extraordinary as a mom who faces her grief with an open heart for others

2. Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment (1983, dir. James L. Brooks)

After conquering TV with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, writer-director James L. Brooks gave movies a shot with this adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel. It helped to have the likes of Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson in lead roles. While MacLaine’s Aurora Greenway is maddeningly overprotective of her adult daughter Emma (Debra Winger), her maternal devotion doesn’t erase her less flattering traits of supreme self-centeredness, overly righteous indignation and merciless perfectionism. In other words, Aurora is complicated, and MacLaine tears into the character with actorly gusto. She rightly won the Academy Award for Best Actress, beating out Terms of Endearment co-star Winger and Silkwood’s Meryl Streep. Seven years later, MacLaine played another ambivalent mom, this time with Streep as daughter, in Postcards from the Edge.

1. Mildred Pierce (1945, dir. Michael Curtiz)

If Christina Crawford’s explosive memoir, Mommie Dearest, forever tainted the reputation of her starlet mom, at least Joan Crawford’s legacy will always include Mildred Pierce. Adapted from a James M. Cain novel, the noir melodrama resurrected Crawford’s career after leaving MGM for Warner Bros., and as the cherry on top, her performance earned the Academy Award for Best Actress. Our titular heroine is a tough-as-nails single mother whose business savvy is undercut by her slavish devotion to no-good, nasty daughter Veda (Ann Blyth). Cain loved Crawford’s portrayal, sending her a leather-bound copy of the book inscribed with praise for bringing his creation to life. The New York Times was less impressed. Its reviewer found it implausible that someone as smart as Mildred “could be so completely dominated by a selfish and grasping daughter who spells trouble in capital letters.” Hmm. The unnamed critic must have had limited interaction with motherhood.

(See more in The 15 best film noir.)

Honorable mention: Ripley in Aliens (1986, dir. James Cameron), Charlotte Andergast in Autumn Sonata (1978, dir. Ingmar Bergman), Nola Carveth in The Brood (1979, dir. David Cronenberg), Dolores Claiborne (1995, dir. Taylor Hackford), Annie Johnson in Imitation of Life (1959, dir. Douglas Sirk), Suyuan Woo in The Joy Luck Club (1993, dir. Wayne Wang), Mrs. Bates in Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock), Stella Dallas (1937, dir. King Vidor), Eva Khatchadourian in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, dir. Lynne Ramsey), Ma Jarrett in White Heat (1949, dir. Raoul Walsh)