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George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was a foremost American director of film and theatre, actor, screenwriter, broadcaster and producer. As a child prodigy, he studied many forms of entertainment, and excelled in many capacities in the entertainment industry. He gained national fame for his October 30, 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. He is best known for his 1941 film classic Citizen Kane.

Youth and early career

Welles was born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin to Richard Head Welles, a wealthy inventor, and Beatrice Ives, a concert pianist. At eighteen months, Welles was declared a child prodigy by Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician. His mother taught him Shakespeare, as well as the piano and violin; he learned magic from vaudevillians. When Welles was six, his parents divorced and his mother moved to Chicago with him, where he attended the opera, theatre and concerts. Beatrice Welles died of jaundice on May 10, 1924 in a Chicago hospital. Richard Welles died when the boy was fifteen, leaving him cared for by Bernstein, who enrolled him in the Todd School of Illinois.

Welles performed and staged his first theatrical productions while attending the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois and was brought under the guidance of the principal, Roger Hill. While there he was also tutored by Dorothy Hartshorne, a singer and the widow of theologian and philosopher Charles Hartshorne. He made his stage debut at the Gate Theatre of Dublin, Ireland in 1931 when he talked himself onto the stage and appeared in small supporting roles. By 1934 he was a radio director and actor in the United States, working with some cast members of the later Mercury Theatre. In that year, he married the actress and socialite Virginia Nicholson. His early film, The Hearts of Age, also featured Nicholson.

Renown in theater and radio

In 1936, the Federal Theatre Projects began putting theatre performers and employees to work. Welles was assigned to direct a project in Harlem. His Macbeth was set in Haiti, at the court of King Henri Christophe.

After the success of Macbeth, Welles put on Dr. Faustus and a satire, Horse Eats Hat. In 1937, Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock at the Maxine Elliott Theatre was closed by the Federal Theatre Project on the day of its first dress rehearsal. Welles and his co-producer, John Houseman, announced to ticketholders that the show was being taken to another theater. Cast, crew and audience walked to The Venice, about twenty blocks away. The Cradle Will Rock began with its author introducing the show and playing the piano accompaniment onstage. Since the unions forbade the actors and musicians to perform from the stage, it was played from the audience seats. The show was a hit.

Welles and Houseman formed their own company, the Mercury Theatre. Their first production was Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, set in a modern Fascist state. Cinna the Poet died at the hands not of a mob but a secret police force. According to Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna, "it stopped the show." The applause lasted more than 3 minutes. It was a great success and widely acclaimed.

Welles was very active on radio, first as an actor and soon as a director and producer. He began playing Lamont Cranston, The Shadow, in late 1937, and in the summer of 1938 with the Mercury Theatre began weekly broadcasts of radio plays based on literary works. Their October 30 broadcast of that year was H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. This brought Welles fame on a national level, as the program's realism created some panic among listeners. The cast of The Mercury Theatre went to Hollywood with him, and so did his radio broadcasting.

Among other radio series Welles produced and directed were:

Welles starred in The Lives of Harry Lime in 1951-52 for the BBC. He hosted and narrated another BBC series, The Black Museum, dramatizing famous cases from Scotland Yard's "Museum of Death."

Welles in Hollywood

Welles toyed with various ideas for his first project for RKO, settling briefly on an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He planned to film the action with a subjective camera from the protagonist's point of view. Welles finally found a suitable project in an idea suggested by screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Initially called American, it was eventually Welles' first feature film, Citizen Kane (1941).

Welles was once again the center of controversy with Citizen Kane. The gossip writer Louella Parsons convinced the press magnate, William Randolph Hearst, that he was the basis for Kane, with the result that Hearst's media empire boycotted the film.

Welles' second film for RKO was The Magnificent Ambersons, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington, and on which RKO executives hoped to make back the money lost by Citizen Kane's relative commercial failure.

Simultaneously, he worked on a spy thriller, Journey Into Fear, which he co-wrote with Joseph Cotten. In addition to acting in the film, Welles was also a producer. Direction was credited solely to Norman Foster, but the film is evidently co-directed by Welles.

During the production of Ambersons, Welles was asked to make a documentary film about South America on behalf of the government. Welles left the United States to begin shooting this documentary after putting together the first rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, on the understanding that further editing decisions would be carried out via telegram. The studio wrested control of the film from Welles' Mercury Productions staff, cut over fifty minutes of footage, and rearranged the editing. Welles' South American documentary, titled It's All True, never saw completion in his lifetime. The surviving footage was released in 1993.

In 1946, International Pictures released Welles' film The Stranger, starring Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young and Welles. Sam Spiegel produced the film, which details the American life of a Nazi war criminal. He next made The Lady from Shanghai at Columbia Pictures. Welles starred with his second wife, Rita Hayworth. The Lady from Shanghai suffered heavy editing by the studio, with approximately an hour removed from Welles' final cut.

At Republic Pictures, he directed Macbeth. The released version was trimmed of about twenty minutes of footage, including a ten-minute take.

Welles after Hollywood

Welles left Hollywood for Europe in 1948.

The following year, Welles appeared as Harry Lime in The Third Man with Joseph Cotten. Several episodes of his later radio series The Lives of Harry Lime written by Welles himself served as the basis of Mr. Arkadin.

From 1949 to 1952, Welles worked on Othello, filming on location in Europe and Morocco. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but was not given a general release in the United States and played only in New York and Los Angeles. In 1992, the American release version of this film was subject to a controversial restoration from a nitrate negative, despite the fact the original European version of the film was widely available and popular in Europe. With a drastically changed and completely rerecorded soundtrack, the film went on a successful theatrical run in America.

Mr. Arkadin (1955) stars Welles as a magnate whose past is obscure and brought to light at his own insistence by the investigations of a prospective son-in-law.

In 1958, Welles returned to Hollywood to film Whit Masterson's novel Badge of Evil (which he famously claimed never to have read). Originally only hired as an actor, he was promoted to director by Universal Studios when Charlton Heston refused to star in the film unless Welles was at the helm. Touch of Evil was wrested from Welles' hands, cut down and reshot. He protested in a 58-page memo outlining his objections to the studio's version. Even in this state, the film was widely praised across Europe, awarded the top prize at the Brussels World's Fair by judges (and then critics) François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who both cited it as being highly influential on their own respective debuts, The 400 Blows (1959) and Breathless (1960). In 1998, editor Walter Murch, working from the original memo and a workprint version, restored the film as close as possible to Welles' original vision.

Welles spent most of the rest of his directorial career in Europe, financed with acting fees or by sympathetic producers. On most of these projects he retained final cut, but the independence thus gained also resulted in drastically reduced budgets and technical facilities. Despite these setbacks, some of Welles' best work was produced during this period, including The Trial and Chimes at Midnight.

He returned to Hollywood in the early seventies, where he continued to work on various film and television projects, including the fully-shot and mostly-edited The Other Side Of The Wind, and remained there until his death in 1985. F for Fake (1974) is a tale of art forgery and other forms of charlatanism.

Television

Welles' major work in television is little known. The Orson Welles Sketchbook (1955) was created for the BBC and featured Welles telling stories and drawing pictures to illustrate them. The director also created Around the World with Orson Welles (1955) for the BBC. In this series, he experimented with a film-essay format, foreshadowing his later F for Fake (1974). Welles also guest-starred as himself on a 1956 episode of I Love Lucy called "Lucy Meets Orson Welles". The Fountain of Youth (1958) was made for American TV and in it Welles offers some possibilities for expanding the medium's vocabulary. Between 1965 and 1984 Welles made several appearances on Dean Martin's Variety Series (1965) and Celebrity Roasts as a guest panelist. The Immortal Story (1968) was filmed for French television and stars Welles himself with Jeanne Moreau, from a short story by Isak Dinesen. In Portrait of Gina (1958), the director and narrator roams through Italy, finally arriving at Gina Lollobrigida's home. Welles continued to work in TV through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, but little of it was ever broadcast. A version of The Merchant of Venice (1969) was not completed because a reel was stolen and never recovered. Clips from unfinished TV projects appear in the documentary Orson Welles: The One-Man Band (1995), a look at many of the director's various unreleased projects.

Final years

Like Robert Bresson, Welles in his later years was unable to get funding for his filmscripts, of which he had a drawerful (including an Odyssey of Homer). After a studio auction, he complained that Steven Spielberg spent $50,000 for a Rosebud sled, but wouldn't give him a dime to make a picture. During his career he won one Oscar and was nominated for a further four. Among his later film appearances were as Father Mapple in John Huston's Moby-Dick (1956), as Cardinal Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons (1966), and as General Dreedle in Mike Nichols's Catch-22 (1970). In 1971 the Academy gave him an honorary award "For superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures".

Welles died at his home in Hollywood, California at the age of 70 on October 10, 1985. He had various projects underway, King Lear, The Orson Welles Magic Show and The Dreamers, from two stories by Isak Dinesen, of which around twenty-five minutes had been filmed. Only weeks before his passing, he had completed recording for what proved to be his final performance, as the voice of the planet-sized robot Unicron for the animated feature, The Movie. Welles' opinion of his final role was extremely dismissive and angry, he referred to playing Unicron as a toy in a movie where two groups of toys do awful things to each other.

His ashes were placed at a friend's estate in Ronda, Spain, at his request. According to some reports, some of his ashes have been scattered in the town's famous Plaza de Toros, the oldest bullfighting ring in Spain still in use.

Unfinished projects

Welles' exile from Hollywood and reliance on independent production meant that many of his later projects were filmed piecemeal or were not completed. In the mid-1950s, Welles began work on Cervantes' Don Quixote, initially a commission from CBS television. Welles expanded the film to feature length, developing the screenplay to take Quixote and Sancho Panza into the modern age. The project was finally abandoned with the death of Francisco Reiguera, the actor playing Quixote, in 1969. An incomplete version of the film was released in 1992.

In 1970 Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind, about the effort of a film director (played by John Huston) to complete his last Hollywood picture, and is largely set at a lavish party. Although in 1972 the film was reported by Welles as being "96% complete", the negative remained in a Paris vault until 2004, when Peter Bogdanovich (who also acted in the film) announced his intention to complete the production. Footage is included in the documentary Working with Orson Welles (1993)

Other unfinished projects include an adaptation of Charles Williams' The Deep, abandoned due to the death of Laurence Harvey one scene away from completion, and The Big Brass Ring, the script of which was adapted and filmed by George Hickenlooper in 1999.

Trivia

  • As a child he was deeply fascinated by conjuring, both stage and close up. There is a myth that the young Welles was taught magic by Harry Houdini when he was 5 years old. He travelled with a magic act on several occasions throughout his adult life. His interest in the psychology employed by a magician surfaced in much of his film-making. For example, in Citizen Kane, during the dialogue in the famous puzzle scene with his wife Susan Alexander, Kane walks back in the shot to stand near the fireplace. He is unexpectedly dwarfed by the fireplace; a visual representation of his downward decline. The optical illusion obtained by Welles employs principles of 'manipulation of perspective' used by magicians.

  • During Welles' radio years, he often freelanced and would split his time between the Mercury Theatre, CBS, Mutual, and NBC, among others. Due to this, Welles rarely rehearsed, instead reading ahead during other actors' lines, a practice used by some radio stars of the time. Many of his co-stars on The Shadow have remarked about this in various interviews. There are a number of apocryphal stories where Welles was reported to have turned to an actor during the mid-show commercial break and commented that this week's story was fascinating and he couldn't wait to "find out how it all ends." Welles admitted to preferring the cold-reading style in his on-air performances as he described the hectic nature of radio work to Peter Bogdanovich in This Is Orson Welles:

Soon I was doing so many * that I didn't even rehearse. I'd come to a bad end in some tearjerker on the seventh floor of CBS and rush up to the ninth (they'd hold an elevator for me), where, just as the red light was going on, somebody'd hand me a script and whisper, "Chinese mandarin, seventy-five years old", and off I'd go again... Not rehearsing... made it so much more interesting. When I was thrown down the well or into some fiendish snake pit, I never knew how I'd get out.

  • Also due to Welles' often tight radio schedule, he was hard pressed to find ways to get from job to job in busy New York City traffic. In an interview conducted in his later years, Welles tells how he "discovered that there was no law in New York that you had to be sick to travel in an ambulance." Therefore, he took to hiring ambulances to take him, sirens blazing, through the crowded streets to get to various buildings.

  • His regular dinner: two steaks and a pint of scotch. During his early years, especially while filming Citizen Kane, Welles' entire dinner menu also included a full pineapple, triple pistachio ice cream, and a full bottle of scotch.

  • According to a 1941 physical (Welles was 26), he was 72 inches tall, and weighed 218 pounds. His eyes were brown. (From the first volume of Simon Callow's biography: Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu.)

  • He was born on the day that Babe Ruth hit his first home run.

  • Welles had three daughters: Christopher Feder, born 1937; mother Virginia Nicholson, Rebecca Welles, born in 1944, died 2004; mother, Rita Hayworth and Beatrice Welles-Smith born in November 1955, mother, Paola Mori.

  • The Brain, the evil genius lab mouse in the cartoon series Pinky and the Brain, was loosely based on Orson Welles. Voice artist Maurice LaMarche provided the voice of The Brain, and would later portray a bloated Orson Welles at the low point of his television career in The Critic.

Selected filmography

Directed by Welles

Other notable films

Further reading

  • Callow, Simon. The Road to Xanadu. Cape, 1995.
  • Callow, Simon. Hello Americans. Cape, 2006.
  • Cowie, Peter. The Cinema of Orson Welles, Da Capo Press, 1973.
  • Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios, Chicago Review Press, 2005.
  • Mac Liammóir, Micháel. Put Money in Thy Purse: The Filming of Orson Welles' Othello, Methuen, 1976.
  • McBride, Joseph. Orson Welles, Da Capo Press, 1996.
  • Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson Welles, Southern Methodist University Press, 1989.
  • Naremore, James. Citizen Kane: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Thomson, David. Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, Vintage, 1996.
  • Welles, Orson et al. This is Orson Welles, Da Capo Press, 1998.
  • Higham, Charles. Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius, St. Martin's Press, 1985

External links

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