Orson Welles, in full George Orson Welles, (born
May 6, 1915, Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S.—died October 10, 1985, Los Angeles,
California), American motion-picture actor, director, producer, and writer. His
innovative narrative techniques and use of photography, dramatic lighting, and
music to further the dramatic line and to create mood made his Citizen Kane
(1941)—which he wrote, directed, produced, and acted in—one of the
most-influential films in the history of the art.
Welles was born to a mother, Beatrice Ives, who
was a concert pianist and a crack rifle shot, and a father, Richard Welles, who
was an inventor and a businessman. Welles was a child prodigy, adept at the
piano and violin, acting, drawing, painting, and writing verse; he also
entertained his friends by performing magic tricks and staging mini productions
of William Shakespeare’s plays.
Welles’s parents separated when he was four years
old, and his mother died when he was nine. In 1926 Welles entered the exclusive
Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. There his gifts found fertile ground, and
he dazzled the teachers and students with stagings of both modern and classical
plays. His father died in 1930, and Welles became the ward of a family friend, Chicago
doctor Maurice Bernstein. In 1931 he graduated from Todd, but, instead of
attending college, he studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago before
traveling to Dublin, where he successfully auditioned at the Gate Theatre for
the part of the Duke of Württemberg in a stage adaptation of Lion
Feuchtwanger’s novel Jew Süss.
Welles remained in Ireland for a year, acting with
the company at the Abbey Theatre as well as at the Gate; he also designed sets,
wrote a newspaper column, and began directing plays. In 1932 Welles left Dublin
and tried to get work on the stages of London and New York; unsuccessful, he
instead traveled for a year in Morocco and Spain. In 1933 in the United States,
he was introduced to actress Katharine Cornell by author Thornton Wilder and
was hired to act in Cornell’s road company, playing Mercutio in Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet, Marchbanks in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, and Octavius
Barrett in Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In 1934 Welles
organized a summer drama festival at the Todd School, where he played Svengali
in an adaptation of George du Maurier’s Trilby and Claudius in Hamlet. At the
end of the festival, he made his first film, the short The Hearts of Age. With
Todd School headmaster Roger Hill, he prepared Everybody’s Shakespeare (1934),
editions for performance of Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and Julius
Caesar, with introductions by Hill and Welles and illustrations by Welles. He
made his New York debut as Tybalt in Cornell’s production of Romeo and Juliet
in December 1934.
Theatre
And Radio In The 1930s
When Welles was performing in Romeo and Juliet, he met producer John Houseman, who immediately cast him as the lead in Archibald MacLeish’s verse play Panic, which premiered in 1935 for Houseman’s Phoenix Theatre Group. They then moved on in 1936 to mounting productions for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA’s) Federal Theatre Project. Their first effort, for the Federal Theatre’s Negro Division, was Macbeth, with an all African American cast and the setting changed from Scotland to Haiti. They began 1937 with Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (starring Welles). Their most (in)famous effort was Marc Blitzstein’s proletarian musical play The Cradle Will Rock. WPA guards shut down the theatre the night before its opening. (The shutdown was ostensibly for budgetary reasons; however, the political nature of the play was considered too radical.) Welles and Houseman quickly rented another theatre, and on opening night the play was presented with the actors performing their roles from seats in the audience. That same year they formed the Mercury Theatre, which presented a renowned modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
In 1938 the Mercury Theatre presented
William Gillette’s comedy Too Much Johnson. Welles shot three short silent
films to precede each act of the play; however, the films were never finished.
(The Too Much Johnson footage was believed to have been destroyed by fire in
1970; however, it was rediscovered, restored, and premiered in 2013.)
At the same time, Welles was making inroads in
radio. His radio career began early in 1934 with an excerpt from Panic. In 1935
he began appearing regularly on The March of Time news series, and subsequent
radio roles included the part of Lamont Cranston in the mystery series The
Shadow. In 1938 the Mercury players undertook a series of radio dramas adapted
from famous novels. They attained national notoriety with a program based on
H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds; the performance on October 30, using the
format of a simulated news broadcast narrated by Welles, announced an attack on
New Jersey by invaders from Mars. (However, contemporary reports that the
program caused a nationwide panic were exaggerated.)
The national coverage that resulted from his
theatre and radio work brought Welles’s name before Hollywood. In 1939 he
signed an extraordinary contract with RKO that guaranteed him near-total
autonomy and final cut on any film he made. For his first film, Welles chose
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was to be filmed entirely from the
point of view of the narrator Marlow. However, despite months of preparation,
the film never got off the ground. Welles narrated Swiss Family Robinson (1940)
while waiting for another project to evolve.
At
RKO: Citizen Kane And The Magnificent Ambersons
Citizen Kane (1941) is arguably the greatest movie
ever to come out of Hollywood, and it is surely one of the most-impressive
debuts by any director. Welles also produced and coscripted the film with
Herman J. Mankiewicz. Welles submitted a joyfully energetic performance as
Charles Foster Kane, the newspaper magnate (clearly based on newspaper
publisher William Randolph Hearst) who rises from a poor background to amass
uncountable millions—none of which he is able to enjoy, thanks to his epic
ambitions.
Citizen Kane featured an ensemble cast in support
of Welles, composed mostly of Mercury actors, and included Joseph Cotten, Agnes
Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Paul Stewart, and Ruth Warrick. Shot with an array
of classic and experimental techniques by Gregg Toland, evocatively scored by
Bernard Herrmann, and edited brilliantly by Robert Wise, Citizen Kane was a
masterpiece of moviemaking. It was also the last time Welles made a Hollywood
movie that reached the screen intact.
Although it initially received rave reviews,
Citizen Kane was not a financial success. RKO found the film—with its complex flashback
structure and lack of an appealing protagonist—difficult to market, and its box
office was also hindered by the Hearst newspapers’ using their power to
hamstring its commercial prospects. Nevertheless, Citizen Kane received nine
Academy Award nominations, of which Welles received three (best actor,
director, and original screenplay), but only the screenplay won an Oscar.
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was produced,
written, and directed by Welles, and to some critics it represents the peak of
his artistry—even though it was taken out of his hands by RKO after poor test
screenings. It was heavily reedited by Wise (44 minutes were cut), and a new
ending was tacked on. The Magnificent Ambersons was adapted from Booth
Tarkington’s novel about the declining fortunes of a wealthy 19th-century
Indianapolis family whose smugness (and inability to comprehend the
significance of industrialization and the automobile) leads to their downfall.
The ensemble cast featured Tim Holt as the spoiled scion whose arrogance finally
earns him a well-deserved comeuppance that nonetheless carries the weight of
tragedy. Mercury actors (and Citizen Kane veterans) Cotten, Moorehead, and Ray
Collins all delivered fine performances, and former silent star Dolores
Costello and young Anne Baxter demonstrated Welles’s attention to his female
actors. Photographed brilliantly by Stanley Cortez, The Magnificent Ambersons
was nominated for a best picture Oscar.
Even while Wise was cutting The Magnificent
Ambersons, Welles was in South America filming his quasi-documentary It’s All
True, an anthology of three short films: “The Story of Samba (Carnaval),” about
Rio de Janeiro’s annual Carnival; “My Friend Bonito,” about bullfighting; and
“Four Men on a Raft,” about four humble fishermen who become national heroes
after a daring voyage. RKO canceled the project midway, leaving Welles stranded
in Rio. (The legendary project, never released, resurfaced when the mostly
extant footage from “Four Men on a Raft” was assembled by Richard Wilson, Bill Krohn,
and Myron Meisel as part of the documentary It’s All True: Based on an
Unfinished Film by Orson Welles [1993].)
Welles had started work on Journey into Fear
(1943) before leaving for Brazil, and he returned to find that RKO had begun
meddling with it, as it had with The Magnificent Ambersons. This time, though,
Welles was able to intercede and restore at least some of the brutal editing,
but it was released at 69 minutes, having been cut down from 91. Journey into
Fear was officially credited to Norman Foster, a director who also assisted
Welles on It’s All True, but it was produced, coscripted, and acted in by
Welles, who played the supporting part of Colonel Haki of Turkish intelligence.
The hand of Welles is clearly evident, although Welles later said that he
“designed the film but can’t properly be called its director.” A gripping (if
sometimes confusing) adaptation of Eric Ambler’s thriller about espionage and
munitions smuggling, Journey into Fear starred Welles’s then paramour, Dolores
Del Rio, as the mysterious Josette, and Citizen Kane veterans Cotten (who
cowrote the screenplay), Warrick, Moorehead, and Sloane enhanced the
production. However, RKO was unimpressed, and its new executives kicked Welles
and his Mercury Productions off the lot.
Films
Of The Later 1940s: The Stranger, The Lady From Shanghai, And Macbeth
Welles spent the rest of 1943 making two radio
series, entertaining American troops fighting in World War II with a touring
magic show with the assistance of Rita Hayworth (whom he married), Marlene
Dietrich, Cotten, and Moorehead, giving speeches on behalf of the war effort,
and even substituting for Jack Benny on his radio show. He also played the
mysterious Rochester in Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1943) opposite Joan
Fontaine. But none of the studios was rushing to sign him as a director. He
starred opposite Claudette Colbert in Irving Pichel’s melodrama Tomorrow Is
Forever (1946) before finally being given a chance by producer Sam Spiegel.
The Stranger (1946) was a thriller about a Nazi,
Franz Kindler (Welles), who is hiding out as a schoolteacher in a small New
England town. His impending nuptials with a fellow teacher (Loretta Young) are
interrupted when a war-crimes investigator (Edward G. Robinson) tracks him down
and then waits for Kindler to give himself away. Welles was not happy with his
work—he was trying to adhere to a strict schedule and budget to repair his
reputation and so could ill afford any of his trademark flourishes—and The
Stranger was thus his most-conventional film.
Heavily in debt from the failure of a colossal
stage version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, Welles began
shooting the film noir The Lady from Shanghai in 1946 for Columbia Pictures.
The story, based on a potboiler by Sherwood King, was reimagined by Welles as a
feverishly intricate meditation on the nature of evil, with Welles as the
philosophic protagonist, sailor Michael O’Hara. Hayworth (temporarily reunited
with Welles after having been separated for a year) was the treacherous Elsa
Bannister, and Mercury veteran Sloane played her crippled but poisonous
husband, the corrupt lawyer Arthur Bannister. It was released in 1948.
In a typical display of mordant humour, Welles had
Hayworth shorn of her trademark red tresses and dyed a platinum blond, one of
many points of contention between Welles and Columbia’s president, Harry Cohn.
The expensive (and rather complex) picture, shot in a variety of colourful
Mexican locations, was a box-office failure. Today The Lady from Shanghai is
regarded as one of Welles’s masterpieces, a triumph of style especially in its
climactic shoot-out in a hall of mirrors, even though Welles was unable to
oversee its final, heavily truncated cut.
In 1947 Welles then made a loose but strikingly
original film adaptation, Macbeth (1948), which he shot in 23 days at genre
factory Republic Pictures. He had prepared for the low-budget shoot by
directing a stage production in Salt Lake City, Utah, with most of the cast.
Welles summarized his low-budget achievement by describing it as “a kind of
violently sketched charcoal drawing of a great play.” He used stylized sets and
long takes to support his vision. (Although it was originally released at 107
minutes, the film was for many years seen only in an 86-minute version with the
cast’s original Scottish accents redubbed.)
After finishing shooting Macbeth, Welles went to
Italy, where he acted as the 18th-century charlatan and magician Cagliostro
(and directed a few scenes) in Gregory Ratoff’s Black Magic (1949). He starred
in other films, including Henry King’s Prince of Foxes (1949), as a colourful
Cesare Borgia, and most famously Carol Reed’s classic thriller The Third Man
(1949), as the amoral Harry Lime. Welles would spend much of the next 25 years
in Europe.
Films Of The 1950s: Othello, Mr. Arkadin, And
Touch Of Evil
Welles next played a 13th-century warlord in Henry
Hathaway’s The Black Rose (1950). He had begun shooting Othello in 1948 in
Venice. Over the next three years, Welles fitfully continued filming it on
location in Italy and Morocco and in a Rome studio, stopping whenever funds ran
low to take on another acting assignment. Since the actors were not always all
available, some scenes of conversations were edited together out of close-ups
shot years apart. The result was finally shown at Cannes in 1952, winning the
top prize. The nearly unknown cast—aside from Welles as Othello, it starred
Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona and Irish actor Micheál
MacLiammóir (whom Welles had known since his time at the Gate Theatre) as
Iago—ensured that its commercial prospects would remain modest. However, the
film contains some of Welles’s greatest camerawork and is regarded by some as
one of his greatest achievements.
Mr. Arkadin (1955; also called Confidential
Report) was based on an original story by Welles and was financed by European
investors, who removed him from the film during editing. It is a Citizen
Kane-like story with a different but equally tragic ending: the wealthy and
powerful Arkadin (Welles) hires a shady young American (Robert Arden) to
reassemble his past history, which the tycoon claims to have forgotten but
actually fears will be so rife with scandal that his beloved daughter (Paolo
Mori) will turn away from him in horror. During Welles’s lifetime the film
circulated in at least three versions, each with slightly different material,
and it was not until 2006 that a “comprehensive version” was assembled. As with
so many of Welles’s later works, the picture’s merits wrestle fiercely with its
production deficiencies.
In 1955 Welles also began shooting Don Quixote, a
contemporary reworking of the Miguel de Cervantes tale that he also produced,
narrated, and coscripted. He worked on and off on Don Quixote until his death.
At one point he even said the film would be called When Are You Going to Finish
Don Quixote. The film was never completed. A fragmentary form of Don Quixote
was assembled by Spanish filmmakers Patxi Irigoyen and Jesús Franco in 1992,
but it was disparaged by film critics.
Welles accepted many film acting assignments in
England, France, and Italy. He made two series of short documentaries for
British television, Orson Welles’ Sketch Book and Around the World with Orson
Welles (both 1955), and that same year he also produced Moby Dick—Rehearsed for
the London stage, an adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel in which he appeared
as Captain Ahab and Father Mapple. American audiences saw him as Father Mapple
in John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956) and as the imposing Varner in Martin Ritt’s
The Long, Hot Summer (1958). He then returned to Hollywood for the first time
in 10 years to make what is considered one of his finest, and most personal,
films.
Touch of Evil (1958) was based on a detective
novel by Whit Masterson. Welles took its plot about a crooked police chief and
embroidered it with themes close to his heart—guilt and redemption, situational
ethics versus absolute morality, relative versus utter evil—and some of his
most-dazzling camera work. (The picture’s opening tracking shot is one of
Welles’s most famous.) Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh starred as a Mexican
police officer and his American wife caught in a maze of corruption just over
the Mexican border, but it is really Welles as the crooked police chief Hank
Quinlan and Dietrich as a hard-boiled madam who steal the show. Welles
delivered a rough cut to Universal and then went to Mexico to shoot some scenes
for Don Quixote. When he returned, Universal had added some footage and cut it
down to 93 minutes. Welles wrote an extensive memo detailing his preferred
changes. He was ignored, but in 1998 Universal released a 111-minute cut
following Welles’s memo. Touch of Evil was Welles’s last Hollywood film.
Later Films: Chimes At Midnight, The Other Side Of
The Wind, And F For Fake
Welles acted in such films as Huston’s The Roots
of Heaven (1958) and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion (1959). He also used his
famous mellifluous baritone in narrating films, such as Fleischer’s The Vikings
(1958) and Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961). He made The Trial (1962) in
Europe. Franz Kafka’s novel of existential dread was a good match for Welles’s
baroque pessimism, and, indeed, Welles considered it one of his best. Anthony
Perkins (convincingly anguished as Joseph K.), Welles (formidable as Hastler,
the advocate), Jeanne Moreau, and Romy Schneider made for an exceptional cast.
Casting himself as Shakespeare’s buffoon Sir John
Falstaff and borrowing elements from Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, The
Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Richard II, Welles assembled an
impressionistic and often moving tribute to the grandeur of Shakespeare in
Chimes at Midnight (1965; also called Falstaff). Welles struggled against
budgetary and technical limitations—much of the picture was poorly dubbed—but
he skillfully used Spanish locations and an excellent cast that included John
Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford, Moreau, and Fernando Rey. The Battle of
Shrewsbury sequence toward the end of the film has been lauded as one of Welles’s
best. But it is Welles’s shambling, stumbling Falstaff who is rightly the
film’s centerpiece, and justice is done to his tragic fate.
After roles in René Clément’s Is Paris Burning?
(1966), Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons (1966), and the James Bond spoof
Casino Royale (1967), Welles made Histoire immortelle (1968; The Immortal
Story), an hour-long film for French television based on an Isak Dinesen
novella. He also shot the thriller The Deep between 1967 and 1969; however, the
film was never completed. Many more acting appearances followed, including
roles in Huston’s The Kremlin Letter (1970), Mike Nichols’s Catch-22 (1970, as
General Dreedle), and Brian De Palma’s Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972).
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