Orson Welles

George Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the second son of Richard Welles, an inventor and businessman, and Beatrice Ives Welles, a concert pianist and suffragist ^[1]. The household prized music, books, and conversation, and the boy was treated from the start as a prodigy. His parents separated when he was young, and his mother died in 1924, days after his ninth birthday. His father died in 1930, leaving the fifteen year old effectively an orphan under the guardianship of Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician and family friend ^[1].

The decisive institution of his youth was the Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, where headmaster Roger Hill gave him nearly free rein to stage plays, edit texts, and run a student theater ^[2]. Welles later collaborated with Hill on Everybody's Shakespeare, a series of annotated performing editions that stayed in classroom use for decades. After graduating in 1931 he skipped college, traveled to Ireland on a sketching tour, and talked his way into the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where he made his professional stage debut at sixteen by claiming, untruthfully, to be a Broadway veteran ^[2].

Back in the United States, Welles toured with Katharine Cornell's company and reached Broadway in 1934. His breakthrough came through the Federal Theatre Project, the Depression era jobs program for performers. In 1936 he directed an all Black cast in a version of Macbeth set in Haiti, staged at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem; the production, often called the Voodoo Macbeth, drew enormous crowds and made the twenty one year old director famous ^[3]. A 1937 production of Marc Blitzstein's pro labor opera The Cradle Will Rock was blocked by federal authorities, so Welles and producer John Houseman led the audience to another theater and performed it anyway, with the cast singing from the seats ^[3].

That same year Welles and Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre, opening with a modern dress Julius Caesar that framed the play as a warning about fascism ^[3]. The company moved into radio, and on October 30, 1938, its adaptation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, presented partly as simulated news bulletins, frightened some listeners into believing Martians had landed in New Jersey ^[4]. Newspaper accounts of mass panic were exaggerated, but the episode made Welles a national name overnight. RKO Pictures soon offered him a Hollywood contract of unusual generosity for a newcomer, including considerable creative control over his first picture ^[4].

Among the central Orson Welles achievements, Citizen Kane (1941) comes first. Welles co wrote the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz, directed, produced, and played the title role: a newspaper magnate whose life is reconstructed after his death through contradictory recollections ^[5]. Working with cinematographer Gregg Toland, Welles used deep focus compositions, low angles that revealed ceilings, overlapping dialogue, and a nonlinear structure built around the dying man's last word, Rosebud. Because the character resembled press baron William Randolph Hearst, Hearst's newspapers attacked the film and its release suffered. It won a single Academy Award, for the screenplay, yet critics' polls conducted by Sight and Sound ranked it the greatest film ever made in every decade from 1962 through 2002 ^[5].

His second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), adapted from Booth Tarkington's novel, was cut by more than forty minutes and given a new ending by RKO while Welles was in Brazil working on a wartime goodwill project; the removed footage was destroyed ^[6]. Even mutilated, the film is widely regarded as a major work. Welles never again enjoyed the freedom of his first contract, but he kept directing: the thriller The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947) with its hall of mirrors shootout, and a fast, low budget Macbeth (1948) ^[6].

In Europe he made Othello, assembled over several years as money allowed, which shared the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952 ^[7]. Back in Hollywood he directed Touch of Evil (1958), a border town noir remembered for its long opening crane shot, though the studio recut that film too. Chimes at Midnight (1966), which fused several Shakespeare plays around the character of Falstaff, was the picture Welles himself often named as his favorite, and many critics now place it beside Kane ^[7]. As an actor for other directors he created the black marketeer Harry Lime in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), one of the most celebrated supporting turns in film history ^[6].

Welles married three times. His first wife, Chicago socialite and actress Virginia Nicolson, whom he wed in 1934, was the mother of his daughter Christopher ^[1]. In 1943 he married the film star Rita Hayworth; their daughter Rebecca was born in 1944, and the couple divorced in 1948 after making The Lady from Shanghai together. His third marriage, in 1955, was to the Italian actress Paola Mori, who appeared in his film Mr. Arkadin and was the mother of his daughter Beatrice ^[1]. From the mid 1960s until his death, his companion and creative partner was the Croatian born actress Oja Kodar, who co wrote and appeared in his late work ^[8].

Offscreen he was a lifelong magician who performed sleight of hand on stage and television, and during the Second World War he ran a Mercury Wonder Show for servicemen, sawing Marlene Dietrich in half ^[2]. He was politically active in the 1940s, writing a newspaper column, campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt, and using his radio program to demand justice for Isaac Woodard, a Black veteran blinded by a South Carolina policeman ^[3]. Welles struggled with his weight for much of his adult life and joked about it publicly, while his voice, a resonant bass, remained one of the most recognizable instruments in American media ^[8].

From the late 1950s onward Welles worked mostly as an independent, financing films out of his acting fees and leaving several projects unfinished when money ran out, among them adaptations of Don Quixote and The Deep ^[8]. He completed The Trial (1962), from Kafka's novel, and The Immortal Story (1968) for French television. F for Fake (1973), a playful essay film about art forgery and authorship, was his last major completed work as director ^[8].

In his final decades he was a familiar American television presence, appearing on talk shows, narrating documentaries, and voicing commercials, including a much parodied campaign for Paul Masson wine. Honors accumulated even as funding did not: the American Film Institute gave him its Life Achievement Award in 1975, and he received an honorary Academy Award in 1971 ^[6]. Through these years he shot extensive footage for The Other Side of the Wind, a satire of Hollywood starring John Huston, but legal and financial tangles kept it unfinished. Welles died of a heart attack at his home in Los Angeles on October 10, 1985, at age seventy, hours after taping an interview on The Merv Griffin Show ^[9]. His ashes were later interred on the property of a retired bullfighter friend in Ronda, Spain.

Any Orson Welles biography must reckon with a double reputation: the wonder boy who made Citizen Kane at twenty five, and the exile who spent forty years improvising ways to keep shooting. Critics such as Andre Bazin argued that his deep focus staging changed the grammar of cinema by letting viewers choose where to look inside a shot, and directors from Stanley Kubrick to Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson have acknowledged his influence ^[5]. Film schools still teach Kane's structure, Ambersons's tracking shots, and the Touch of Evil opening as foundational texts.

His unfinished work kept generating news long after his death. A reconstruction of Touch of Evil following his own 58 page studio memo appeared in 1998, and The Other Side of the Wind was finally completed and released by Netflix in 2018, thirty three years after he died ^[9]. Among basic Orson Welles facts, one carries the most weight: no other American filmmaker produced a debut so influential or a career so instructive about the collision between artistic ambition and commercial control. Biographers including Simon Callow, whose multivolume life runs to thousands of pages, continue to sift the archive of a man who once said that a movie studio was the biggest electric train set a boy ever had ^[10].