Orson Welles (fourth from left) with classmates at the Todd School for Boys
College/University
Gallery of Orson Welles
Career
Gallery of Orson Welles
Orson Welles at age 22
Gallery of Orson Welles
1938
Welles at the press conference after "The War of the Worlds" broadcast, October 31, 1938
Gallery of Orson Welles
1941
Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane
Gallery of Orson Welles
1942
Orson Welles at work on The Magnificent Ambersons
Gallery of Orson Welles
1945
Orson Welles at work on The Stranger
Gallery of Orson Welles
1946
Orson Welles and Loretta Young in The Stranger
Gallery of Orson Welles
1947
Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai
Gallery of Orson Welles
1949
Orson Welles in The Third Man
Gallery of Orson Welles
1949
Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in The Third Man
Gallery of Orson Welles
1951
Orson Welles in The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice
Gallery of Orson Welles
1955
Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin
Gallery of Orson Welles
1970
Orson Welles, Martin Balsam, and Austin Pendleton in Catch-22
Gallery of Orson Welles
1971
Orson Welles and Tuesday Weld in A Safe Place
Gallery of Orson Welles
1973
Orson Welles in F for Fake
Gallery of Orson Welles
Orson Welles as Macbeth
Gallery of Orson Welles
Chimes at Midnight, the 1966 film directed by and starring Orson Welles, constructs a rich, complex, and moving portrait of the larger-than-life Sir John Falstaff
Gallery of Orson Welles
Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the 1949 film, The Third Man.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Walk of Fame
Orson Welles has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The first, located on the 6500 block of Hollywood Boulevard, is for his contribution to radio. The second, on the 1600 block of Vine Street, is for his work in film.
Director Peter Bogdanovich, and Dinah Shore chat with Orson Welles during the American Film Institute's presentation of the coveted Life Achievement Award.
Chimes at Midnight, the 1966 film directed by and starring Orson Welles, constructs a rich, complex, and moving portrait of the larger-than-life Sir John Falstaff
Orson Welles has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The first, located on the 6500 block of Hollywood Boulevard, is for his contribution to radio. The second, on the 1600 block of Vine Street, is for his work in film.
(A recount of the life and times of notorious 18th-century...)
A recount of the life and times of notorious 18th-century hypnotist/magician/scam artist Cagliostro. Learning the secrets of hypnosis from Dr. Mesmer, Cagliostro exploits this skill to gain wealth, prestige.
(A story of idealism corrupted by wealth, "Citizen Kane" i...)
A story of idealism corrupted by wealth, "Citizen Kane" is the greatest film of all time & is credited with inspiring more directorial careers than any other film in history.
(From 1769 to 1821, Napoléon Bonaparte's life, loves and e...)
From 1769 to 1821, Napoléon Bonaparte's life, loves and exceptional destiny but as seen through the eyes of Talleyrand, the cynic and ironic politician, who once was the Emperor of France's Minister of Foreign Affairs.
(This exceptional film noir portrait of corruption and mor...)
This exceptional film noir portrait of corruption and morally-compromised obsessions stars Welles as Hank Quinlan, a crooked police chief who frames a Mexican youth as part of an intricate criminal plot.
(Orson Welles’s first color film and final completed ficti...)
Orson Welles’s first color film and final completed fictional feature, The Immortal Story is a moving and wistful adaptation of a tale by Isak Dinesen.
(In Orson Welles's free-form documentary F for Fake, the l...)
In Orson Welles's free-form documentary F for Fake, the legendary filmmaker gleefully engages the central preoccupation of his career - the tenuous line between truth and illusion, art and lies. Welles embarks on a dizzying cinematic journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes - not the least of whom is Welles himself.
(Join us on this unique and captivating documentary concer...)
Join us on this unique and captivating documentary concerning the most unusual phenomena on our strange planet. With headlines that are reminiscent of your favorite science fiction films, these spectacles appear almost too good to be true... but are they?
Magician: The Astonishing Life & Work of Orson Welles
(Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles l...)
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles looks at the remarkable genius of Orson Welles on the eve of his centenary - the enigma of his career as a Hollywood star, a Hollywood director (for some a Hollywood failure), and a crucially important independent filmmaker.
George Orson Welles was an American actor, director, writer, and producer who worked in theatre, radio, and film. He is remembered for his innovative work in all three: in theatre, most notably Caesar (1937), a Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; in radio, the legendary 1938 broadcast "The War of the Worlds"; and in film, Citizen Kane (1941), consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made.
Background
Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father, Richard Head Welles, made money by inventing carbide lamp for bicycles. His mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, was a pianist. He had an elder brother named Richard Ives (Dickie) Wells.
Orson had a very troubled childhood. Although the family was quite rich in the beginning, his father’s business began to falter soon after his birth and they moved to Chicago in 1919. His parents separated sometime after this and he was brought up by his mother, who supported him by playing piano. After his mother’s death in 1924 Orson was put under the custody of his alcoholic father.
On December 28, 1930, when Welles was 15, his father died of heart and kidney failure at the age of 58, alone in a hotel in Chicago. Shortly before this, Welles had announced to his father that he would stop seeing him, believing it would prompt his father to refrain from drinking. As a result, Orson felt guilty because he believed his father had drunk himself to death because of him. His father's will left it to Orson to name his guardian. When Roger Hill declined, Welles chose Maurice Bernstein.
Education
Welles briefly attended public school in Madison, Wisconsin. On September 15, 1926, he entered the Todd Seminary for Boys, an expensive independent school in Woodstock, Illinois, that his older brother, Richard Ives Welles, had attended ten years before but was expelled from for misbehavior. At Todd School, Welles came under the influence of Roger Hill, a teacher who was later Todd's headmaster. Hill provided Welles with an ad hoc educational environment that proved invaluable to his creative experience, allowing Welles to concentrate on subjects that interested him. Welles performed and staged theatrical experiments and productions there.
Following graduation from Todd in May 1931, Welles was awarded a scholarship to Harvard University, while his mentor Roger Hill advocated he attend Cornell College in Iowa. Rather than enrolling, he chose travel. He studied for a few weeks at the Art Institute of Chicago with Boris Anisfeld, who encouraged him to pursue painting.
After a sojourn to Ireland, where he was involved in the theater as an actor, Welles returned to Chicago where he briefly served as a drama coach at the Todd School and co-edited four volumes of Shakespeare's plays. He made his Broadway debut with Katharine Cornell's company in December 1934. He and John Houseman joined forces the next year to manage a unit of the Federal Theatre Project, one of the work-relief arts projects established by the New Deal. Welles' direction was inspired, injecting new life into various classics, including an all-African American Macbeth, the French farce The Italian Straw Hat, and the Elizabethan morality play Dr. Faustus.
Welles and Houseman broke with the Federal Theatre Project over its attempt to censor their June 1937 production of Marc Blitzstein's pro-labor The Cradle Will Rock. They organized the Mercury Theatre, which over the next two seasons had a number of extraordinary successes, including a modern dress anti-Fascist Julius Caesar (with Welles playing Brutus), an Elizabethan working-class comedy The Shoemaker's Holiday (re-written by Welles), and Shaw's Heartbreak House (with the 24-year-old Welles convincingly playing an octogenarian). Welles also found time to play "The Shadow" on radio and to supervise a "Mercury Theatre on the Air, " whose most notorious success was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, which resulted in panic as many listeners believed that Martians were invading New Jersey.
In 1939 the Mercury Theatre collapsed as a result of economic problems; Welles went to Hollywood to find the cash to resurrect it. Except for a stirring dramatization of Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940, an unhappy attempt to stage Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days (music and lyrics by Cole Porter) in 1946, and an unsatisfactory King Lear in 1956, his Broadway career was over. He did continue theater activity overseas: during the 1950s he successfully staged Moby Dick in England, directed Laurence Olivier in the London production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, and wrote a script for a Roland Petit ballet.
Following an early flirtation with movies and after casting around some months for a subject, Welles filmed Citizen Kane in 1939-1940. Since its release in 1941 this film has generally been awarded accolades and in recent years has been acclaimed as one of the best movies of all time. It is a fascinating study of a newspaper publisher (obviously modeled on William Randolph Hearst, despite Welles' disclaimers). Controversy surrounds the production of this film, which Welles is credited with producing, directing, and coscripting. He also played the leading role. However one views the making of this film, there is no doubt about his role as a catalyst.
Years later Welles declared "I began at the top and have been making my way down ever since." All the films he directed are of interest, but none matched his initial achievement. Among his other films are The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady From Shanghai (1946), Othello (1952), Touch of Evil (1958), The Trial (1962), and F Is for Fake (1973). Most of these films have been marked by disputes; Welles often disowned the final version. His critics argue that a self-destructive tendency caused these problems and cite his experiences with the unfinished It's All True, which he embarked on in Brazil in 1942 before finishing the final editing of The Magnificent Ambersons. But his partisans called it a destroyed masterpiece (in his absence 131 minutes were edited down to a final release print of 88 minutes).
A somewhat hammy actor with a magnificent voice, Welles appeared in over 45 films besides his own. In some of these films, such as The Third Man (1949) and Compulsion (1959), he was superb. But all too many were junk movies such as Black Magic (1949) and The Tarters (1960); he accepted these so that he might earn the funds necessary to finance films of his own such as Chimes at Midnight (released in 1966, an exciting film based on various Shakespeare plays and dealing with Falstaff).
For various reasons Welles left the United States after World War II and for three decades lived a kind of gypsy existence abroad, with occasional visits back to America for movie assignments or other work. Welles during World War II had put in a stint as a columnist at the liberal New York Post and later gave some thought to a political career. During the latter part of his life, despite being dogged by ill health, he earned a comfortable living doing television commercials for companies such as Paul Masson wines, putting much of what he earned into the production of various films, including The Other Side of the Wind (which dealt with an old film-maker and which was unfinished at the time of his death as well as being involved in litigation). A superb racontuer, Welles— after moving back to the United States in the mid-1970s— was much in demand as a guest on television talk shows.
(An American adventurer investigates the past of mysteriou...)
1955
Religion
When Peter Bogdanovich once asked him about his religion, Welles gruffly replied that it was none of his business, then misinformed him that he was raised Catholic.
Although the Welles family was no longer devout, it was fourth-generation Protestant Episcopalian and, before that, Quaker and Puritan. Welles's earliest paternal forebear in America, Richard Wells, was a leader of the Quaker community in Pennsylvania. His earliest maternal ancestor in America was John Alden, a crew member on the Pilgrim ship Mayflower. The funeral of Welles's father, Richard H. Welles, was Episcopalian.
In April 1982, when interviewer Merv Griffin asked him about his religious beliefs, Welles replied, "I try to be a Christian. I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God." Near the end of his life, Welles was dining at Ma Maison, his favorite restaurant in Los Angeles, when proprietor Patrick Terrail conveyed an invitation from the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, who asked Welles to be his guest of honor at divine liturgy at Saint Sophia Cathedral. Welles replied, "Please tell him I really appreciate that offer, but I am an atheist."
"Orson never joked or teased about the religious beliefs of others", wrote biographer Barton Whaley. "He accepted it as a cultural artifact, suitable for the births, deaths, and marriages of strangers and even some friends—but without emotional or intellectual meaning for himself."
Politics
Welles was politically active from the beginning of his career. He remained aligned with the left throughout his life, and always defined his political orientation as "progressive". He was a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and often spoke out on radio in support of progressive politics. He campaigned heavily for Roosevelt in the 1944 election. Welles did not support the 1948 presidential bid of Roosevelt's vice president Henry A. Wallace for the Progressive Party, however, later describing Wallace as "a prisoner of the Communist Party."
For several years, he wrote a newspaper column on political issues and considered running for the U.S. Senate in 1946, representing his home state of Wisconsin—a seat that was ultimately won by Joseph McCarthy.
Welles's political activities were reported on pages 155–157 of Red Channels, the anti-Communist publication that, in part, fueled the already flourishing Hollywood Blacklist. He was in Europe during the height of the Red Scare, thereby adding one more reason for the Hollywood establishment to ostracize him.
In 1970, Welles narrated (but did not write) a satirical political record on the administration of President Richard Nixon titled The Begatting of the President.
Welles was also an outspoken critic of racism in the United States and the practice of segregation.
Views
Quotations:
"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone."
"Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others."
"Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch."
"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."
"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people."
"Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck."
"I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."
"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."
Membership
In 1983 Welles was made a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
Académie des Beaux-Arts
1983
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Peter Noble's 1956 biography describes Welles as "a magnificent figure of a man, over six feet tall, handsome, with flashing eyes and a gloriously resonant speaking-voice". Welles said that a voice specialist once told him he was born to be a heldentenor, a heroic tenor, but that when he was young and working at the Gate Theatre in Dublin he forced his voice down into a bass-baritone.
As a baby Welles was prone to illness, including diphtheria, measles, whooping cough and malaria. From infancy he suffered from asthma, sinus headaches, and backache that was later found to be caused by congenital anomalies of the spine. Foot and ankle trouble throughout his life was the result of flat feet. "As he grew older," Brady wrote, "his ill health was exacerbated by the late hours he was allowed to keep an early penchant for alcohol and tobacco."
"Crash diets, drugs, and corsets had slimmed him for his early film roles," wrote biographer Barton Whaley. "Then always back to gargantuan consumption of high-caloric food and booze. By summer 1949, when he was 34, his weight had crept up to a stout 230 pounds. In 1953 he ballooned from 250 to 275 pounds. After 1960 he remained permanently obese."
Quotes from others about the person
"He came into bloom too early. He never could top it." Top what?! His first production on the stage in New York was a black Macbeth in Harlem that set the early evening traffic of Manhattan moving one way — north — for as long as the Federal Theatre Project chose to run the play. He topped this with probably the most stylish French farce ever seen west of the Champs Élysées, and the topping for this was a production of Dr. Faustus that led to the opening of his own theatre, the Mercury, with a production of Julius Caesar so vigorous, so contemporary that it set Broadway on its ear. But luckily, only one ear, for with the other it was listening and running scared with the rest of the country while O. Welles, in a Madison Avenue radio studio, was reading his adaptation of H. G. Wells's account of the Martian invasion of Earth." - Joseph Cotten
"Orson Welles hails a cab like God and tips like a Jesuit." - Jackie Gleason
"So one night we're in the Stork Club and Welles is asking me to recite things from Shakespeare. You know, he asks for a speech and I give it to him. But he tried to trip me up. I said, "Wait a minute, pal, that isn't Shakespeare, that's Aeschylus," and then I recited the lines. He turns to me and says, 'You're the Great One.'" - Jackie Gleason
"Orson revealed his surprising capacity for collaboration. For all the mass of his own ego, he was able to apprehend other people’s weakness and strength and to make creative use of them: he had a shrewn instinctive sense of when to bully or charm, when to be kind or savage…" - John Houseman
"Those of us who were close to Orson had long been aware of the obsessive part his father used to play in his life. Much of what he had accomplished so precociously had been done out of a furious need to prove himself in the eys of a man who was no longer there to see it. Now that success had come, in quantities and of a kind that his father had never dreamed of, this conflict, far from being assuaged, seemed to grow more intense and consuming." - John Houseman
"I never would have amounted to anything in the theatre if it hadn't been for Orson Welles. The way I looked at acting, it was interesting and it was certainly better than going hungry. But I didn't have a serious approach to it until … I bumped into Orson Welles. He was putting on a Federal Theatre production of Macbeth with Negro players and, somehow, I won the part of Banquo. He rehearsed us for six solid months, but when the play finally went on before an audience, it was right — and it was a wonderful sensation, knowing it was right. Suddenly, the theatre became important to me. I had a respect for it, for what it could say. I had the ambition — I caught it from Orson Welles — to work like mad and be a convincing actor. Later, when Native Son came up, he was the stage director. He was the one who gave me the part, and the one who rehearsed me in it for five weeks. If I'm an actor today, it's because of what he did for me, and I'd sort of like people to know it." - Canada Lee
Connections
Orson Welles and Chicago-born actress and socialite Virginia Nicolson were married on November 14, 1934. The couple separated in December 1939 and were divorced on February 1, 1940. After bearing with Welles's romances in New York, Virginia had learned that Welles had fallen in love with Mexican actress Dolores del Río.
Infatuated with her since adolescence, Welles met del Río at Darryl Zanuck's ranch soon after he moved to Hollywood in 1939. Their relationship was kept secret until 1941, when del Río filed for divorce from her second husband. They openly appeared together in New York while Welles was directing the Mercury stage production Native Son. They acted together in the movie Journey into Fear (1943). Their relationship came to an end due, among other things, to Welles's infidelities. Del Río returned to México in 1943, shortly before Welles married Rita Hayworth. Welles married Rita Hayworth on September 7, 1943. They were divorced on November 10, 1947.
In 1955, Welles married actress Paola Mori (née Countess Paola di Girifalco), an Italian aristocrat who starred as Raina Arkadin in his 1955 film, Mr. Arkadin. The couple began a passionate affair, and they were married at her parents' insistence. They were wed in London on May 8, 1955, and never divorced.
Croatian-born artist and actress Oja Kodar became Welles's longtime companion both personally and professionally from 1966 onward, and they lived together for some of the last 20 years of his life.
Welles had three daughters from his marriages: Christopher Welles Feder; Rebecca Welles Manning; and Beatrice Welles.