Orson Welles

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Orson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and died on the 10th of October 1985. In between those dates, he directed what is consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made, terrified radio listeners into believing Martians had invaded New Jersey, and built a theatrical empire from scratch before he turned 25. He was also fired from studios, sabotaged by press barons, and spent much of his adult life chasing financing that never arrived. The question that haunts his career is not how someone could accomplish so much. It is how someone who accomplished so much could so often be left without a camera or a budget. From a Harlem stage to the shores of Morocco, from Rio de Janeiro to the canals of Venice, the story of Orson Welles is a story about genius pressing against institutions that were not built to contain it.

• 2. A Childhood Built from Loss

  ›

  Welles's father, Richard Head Welles, made his fortune inventing a type of bicycle lamp and then lost himself to alcoholism, stopping work altogether after the family separated and moved to Chicago in 1919. His mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, was a concert pianist who had studied with the pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky. She died of hepatitis in a Chicago hospital on the 10th of May 1924, just after Welles's ninth birthday. After that, Welles ceased pursuing a musical career he had only recently begun.

  What followed was years of unsettled wandering with his father. The two traveled to Jamaica and the Far East. When they settled in a hotel his father owned in Grand Detour, Illinois, the hotel burned down. Biographer Frank Brady wrote that during the three years Welles lived with his father, some observers wondered who took care of whom.

  On the 15th of September 1926, Welles entered the Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, where a teacher named Roger Hill gave him an ad hoc educational environment that allowed him to pursue whatever interested him. The school had its own radio station, where Welles performed his first radio adaptation, a version of Sherlock Holmes. On the 28th of December 1930, when Welles was 15, his father died of heart and kidney failure in a Chicago hotel, aged 58. Welles later told biographer Barbara Leaming, fifty-three years after that last visit, "That was the last I ever saw of him. I don't want to forgive myself."

• 3. The Stage and the Radio

  ›

  Welles made his professional stage debut at Dublin's Gate Theatre on the 13th of October 1931, appearing in a role as Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. He was 16 years old and had walked in claiming to be a Broadway star. Gate manager Hilton Edwards later said he had not believed Welles, but was impressed by the sheer brashness of the audition.

  Back in the United States by 1935, Welles was earning as much as $1,500 a week from radio. He was plowing that money back into his stage productions at the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program run by national director Hallie Flanagan. The first of those productions was a celebrated adaptation of Macbeth with an African-American cast of 150, set on a mythical island suggesting the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe. The play opened on the 14th of April 1936, at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and was received rapturously. It then made a 4,000-mile national tour that defied segregation laws, including two weeks at the Texas Centennial Exposition.

  He and producer John Houseman then founded the Mercury Theatre in 1937, naming it after the iconoclastic magazine The American Mercury. The company included Joseph Cotten, Vincent Price, Norman Lloyd, and others who described Welles as unlike any director the American theatre had produced. The Mercury Theatre opened on the 11th of November 1937, with a modern-dress adaptation of Julius Caesar that Joseph Cotten later described as "so vigorous, so contemporary that it set Broadway on its ear."

  Then came the broadcast that changed everything. On the 30th of October 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air aired a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds. Listeners who missed the introduction and tuned in mid-broadcast encountered something that sounded like genuine news bulletins reporting a Martian invasion. Panic reportedly spread. The myth was reported as fact around the world and was disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a speech. Welles was 23 years old.

• 4. Citizen Kane and Its Enemies

  ›

  RKO Radio Pictures president George J. Schaefer offered Welles what is generally regarded as the greatest contract ever extended to a filmmaker. Signed on the 21st of August 1939, the 63-page agreement gave Welles final cut privilege and subordinated the studio's financial interests to his creative control. It was bitterly resented by the Hollywood establishment and persistently mocked in the trade press.

  RKO rejected Welles's first two film proposals. His third, Citizen Kane, they accepted. Welles co-wrote the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz, whose original outline was based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz provided an early draft; Welles wrote his own, then condensed and rearranged both. He cast actors from his Mercury Theatre, including Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, and Everett Sloane, many of them making their film debuts. Cinematographer Gregg Toland joined the production and developed with Welles a technique of deep focus photography that allowed the camera to hold objects in sharp relief from eighteen inches to over two hundred feet away simultaneously. "In life you see everything in focus at the same time, so why not in the movies?" Welles said.

  Hearst fought back. His newspapers barred all reference to the film. MGM's Louis B. Mayer and other major studio executives offered RKO chief George Schaefer a cash payment to destroy the negative and existing prints. Schaefer refused. The film received nine Academy Award nominations but won only Best Original Screenplay, which Welles shared with Mankiewicz. Critics praised it overwhelmingly, but the box office was mediocre, partly because of uneven distribution and the delay caused by the Hearst campaign. Citizen Kane was retired to the vault in 1942. In France it was seen for the first time in 1946 and its reputation grew steadily. In the United States it was re-evaluated after appearing on television in 1956. From 1962 to 2012, it topped the decennial Sight and Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time.

• 5. A Film Dismembered

  ›

  Film historian Robert L. Carringer called the fate of The Magnificent Ambersons "one of film history's great tragedies." Adapted by Welles from Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 novel, the film was in production from the 28th of October 1941 to the 22nd of January 1942, with a cast including Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter and Tim Holt.

  Welles was simultaneously under pressure to film the "Carnaval" segment of It's All True in Brazil. He lashed together a rough cut of Ambersons in Miami with editor Robert Wise, leaving Wise with detailed instructions before departing for South America. A finished 131-minute version was previewed on the 17th of March 1942 in Pomona, where seventy-five percent of the preview cards were negative. RKO authorized changes. Wise removed nearly fifty minutes of footage from Welles's cut, rewrote and reshot several scenes including the ending, and cut the film to 88 minutes. Composer Bernard Herrmann's score was so heavily edited that he severed his ties with the film and threatened legal action if he was not removed from the credits.

  In South America, Welles found his position at RKO crumbling. His principal sponsor, studio president George Schaefer, resigned. Nelson Rockefeller, who had been a primary backer of the Brazil film, left the RKO board. The studio promoted its new management with the motto "Showmanship In Place of Genius: A New Deal at RKO." Welles understood the motto as aimed at him personally. Even in its heavily edited form, The Magnificent Ambersons was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and was added to the National Film Registry in 1991.

• 6. A Filmmaker Without a Studio

  ›

  Touch of Evil, released in 1958, began with Welles hired merely as an actor. It was Charlton Heston who insisted the studio promote him to director. Based on Whit Masterson's novel Badge of Evil, the film reunited Welles with cameraman Russell Metty, makeup artist Maurice Seiderman, and actors including Cotten, Marlene Dietrich, and Akim Tamiroff. Filming finished on schedule and under budget, with the studio praising the daily rushes. Then Universal re-edited the film, reshot scenes, and added new exposition. Welles wrote a 58-page memo outlining his objections and suggestions.

  The film was shown at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, where it won the grand prize. Francois Truffaut saw it there, and it influenced his debut The 400 Blows. In 1998, editor Walter Murch reedited the film according to Welles's 58-page memo, saying he was "flabbergasted" that Welles had been thinking about sound in such specific terms forty years earlier.

  Othello, which Welles self-financed between 1949 and 1951, filming in Italy and Morocco, required suspending production multiple times when he ran out of funds and had to take acting jobs. His daughter Beatrice Welles-Smith restored the film in 1992 for a re-release that included reconstructing Angelo Francesco Lavagnino's original score. The film had premiered at Cannes and won the Grand Prix, the precursor to the Palme d'Or.

  Welles never completed Don Quixote, which he began filming in Mexico in the late 1950s and continued shooting on and off through the 1960s and into the 1980s. At one point he had a complete cut in which Quixote and Sancho Panza end up going to the Moon, but he felt the ending was rendered obsolete by the 1969 Moon landings and burned ten reels of that version.

• 7. The War Years and Civic Life

  ›

  On a single day in August 1942, after more than six months in South America, Welles returned to the United States and a week later produced and emceed the first two hours of a seven-hour coast-to-coast War Bond drive broadcast. Airing on the 29th of August 1942 on the Blue Network, the program featured 21 dance bands and raised more than ten million dollars for the war effort.

  Welles was placed on the U.S. Treasury payroll on the 15th of May 1944 at a retainer of one dollar a year, and on the recommendation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt he led the Fifth War Loan Drive. The drive encouraged Americans to buy sixteen billion dollars in bonds to finance the Normandy landings. Americans ultimately purchased twenty-one billion dollars in War Bonds during the drive, which ended on the 8th of July 1944.

  His political engagement ran deep. He campaigned for Roosevelt in the fall of 1944 at his own expense, traveling to nearly every state. He accompanied Roosevelt to his last campaign rally, speaking before 40,000 people at Boston's Fenway Park on the 4th of November. When Roosevelt died on the 12th of April 1945, Welles delivered a special tribute broadcast from Hollywood at 10:10 p.m. Eastern War Time, saying: "He has no need for homage and we who loved him have no time for tears."

• 8. Legacy and Honors

  ›

  British Film Institute polls in 2002 voted Welles the greatest film director ever. He received an Academy Award, three Grammy Awards, the Golden Lion in 1947, the Palme d'Or in 1952, the Academy Honorary Award in 1970, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1975, and the British Film Institute Fellowship in 1983. In 2018, The Daily Telegraph included him in its list of the greatest Hollywood actors of all time.

  His directorial style, which drew on his deep roots in radio, favored layered and nonlinear narrative forms, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles, deep focus shots, and long takes. His career as an actor brought him some of his most enduring screen appearances, among them Harry Lime in The Third Man in 1949, for which Roger Ebert later described his entrance as the most famous entrance in the movies, and Cardinal Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons in 1966.

  Cinematographer Gregg Toland, speaking about their work on Citizen Kane, captured the spirit of the collaboration: he and Welles believed that "if it was possible, the picture should be brought to the screen in such a way that the audience would feel it was looking at reality, rather than merely at a movie." That aspiration, to make the screen feel indistinguishable from life itself, ran through everything Welles attempted, from the Voodoo Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem to his unfinished portrait of Don Quixote, still being recut in his mind well into the 1980s.