Orson Welles

Film Director

• Born: May 6, 1915
• Birthplace: Kenosha, Wisconsin
• Died: October 10, 1985
• Place of death: Hollywood, California

American film director and actor

Welles breathed fresh life into all the media he explored: stage, radio, and film. Most important, his innovative cinematic techniques in such areas as lighting, camera angles and focus, and sound continue to influence film directors.

Areas of achievement Film, theater and entertainment, radio

Early Life

Orson Welles, the second son of Beatrice and Richard Welles, was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When he was three, the family moved to Chicago. His mother an accomplished amateur pianist saw to his education, immersing the precocious child in literature, the visual arts, and music as she sought to enter a Chicago society that boasted some of the most prominent midwestern families in the United States.

Maurice Bernstein, who had varied medical interests and whose work was pioneering, was a frequent visitor to the Welles home and the probable lover of Beatrice. When the family moved to Chicago, Bernstein moved with them. With the deaths of Beatrice when Orson was nine and Richard when he was fifteen, Bernstein became his legal guardian; indeed, Bernstein had acted as guardian for the boy since Beatrice’s death. Bernstein and Richard had recognized the extraordinary talents and intellect of Orson and sent him to the famous Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, where he received a more disciplined education.

After completion of his studies, the sixteen-year-old Welles took a trip to Ireland, where, after talking himself into an audition, he performed in many plays at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. His performances earned him excellent reviews, made more remarkable by the fact that he often portrayed characters more than twice his age.

Life’s Work

After leaving Ireland, Welles arrived in New York in 1933 and became part of a touring company of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, headed by the husband-and-wife acting team of Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell. Welles’s performance as Tybalt drew the attention of John Houseman, himself an actor and producer. Together they founded the Mercury Theater, their first production being a version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar set in fascist Italy that became the talk of New York in 1937.

However, the production that made the Mercury Theater possible was the now-infamous “voodoo” version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1936, staged at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem and later moved to Broadway. This adaptation of Shakespeare’s play set in the jungles of Haiti was produced by the Negro Theater Unit, part of the Federal Theater Project of the Depression-era 1930’s and directed by the twenty-year-old Welles. A theatrical sensation that turned away thousands (an estimated ten thousand people crowded the streets of Harlem on opening night), Macbeth ran for ten weeks before moving to Broadway.

In the same year that Macbeth was staged, Welles began his famous radio adaptations of literary classics, which became known as Mercury Theater on the Air (later known as the Campbell Playhouse). He starred in the radio series The Shadow playing the mysterious Lamont Cranston. With several projects competing for his time stage productions, radio adaptations, speaking engagements, and essays on the theater he was quickly earning the nickname Boy Wonder, which would follow him for much of his career. Welles enjoyed several theatrical successes over the next two years, but it was his notorious radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds for Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) that gave him national fame. The 1938 production, aired on Halloween night, dramatized a supposed invasion of Martians in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Of the thousands who heard the program, many panicked, believing the United States (and the world) was under attack.

Although Welles and his cast were condemned by the press, disciplined by CBS, and threatened by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the program, it led to an unprecedented offer by Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures Corporation in 1939. Welles would be given total creative control over any project he might choose to develop an offer unheard of in times when the studios “owned” stars, directors, and writers. After a disastrous first attempt at a motion picture project that never materialized, Welles followed up on RKO’s unique offer by turning out a film perennially chosen as the finest film ever made, Citizen Kane (1941). The film, which modeled its main character on publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, draws its particulars from Welles’s own youth. While Citizen Kane was not a commercial success, those knowledgeable about film marveled at the creativity and innovation found in Welles’s cinematic technique.

The following year, Welles adapted Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), about life in a small midwestern town at the beginning of the twentieth century, into a film of the same name. Although the film was nominated for an Academy Award, it too was unpopular with audiences. In fact, as measured by profit, Welles’s artistic successes were few. Continually plagued with cost overruns, dangerous liberal views in an increasingly conservative business, and erratic behavior that alienated studio executives, he found himself with few opportunities and literally dozens of failed or unfinished projects.

However, Welles continued to find enough financial backing to turn out impressive films in which he both starred and directed, such as The Stranger (1946) and The Lady From Shanghai (1948), which costarred his second wife, Rita Hayworth. If Welles despaired as to where his career had taken him, he seemed intent on working on projects of his own choosing, which often had little commercial appeal. Thus he returned to Shakespeare, filming Macbeth (1948) shot in three weeks for a film company best known for cheap Westerns and Othello (1952), a remarkable motion picture that took three years to complete. Although locations and cast members changed throughout the filming, and stories abound about how the actors had to improvise scenes for lack of money, the critics once again recognized the talent of Welles: Othello was awarded the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

During the 1950’s, Welles toured Germany and performed on the London stage, then returned to the United States and directed and acted in Shakespeare’s King Lear in New York. As busy as ever, he returned to Hollywood, once again using his cinematic art to psychologically profile authority corrupted and gone astray, a favorite theme of his. The result was Touch of Evil (1958), a film noir classic, which he directed and in which he starred as the rogue detective Hank Quinlan. In 1962, he adapted and directed Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937), the nightmarish confrontation between the character Joseph K. and the nameless, faceless bureaucracy that condemns him. Four years later, Welles returned to his love for Shakespeare and filmed Chimes at Midnight (1966), an adaptation from Shakespeare’s history plays of the fat knight Falstaff that he had staged in Belfast, Dublin, and London in 1960. Welles, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, could not achieve any of his former greatness. While he appeared as an actor in numerous films, his last completed film was F for Fake (1975), a part-documentary and part-scripted work that celebrates illusion and charlatans.

It remains unfortunate that many filmgoers are unfamiliar with Welles’s work or unaware of the tremendous influence he had on filmmaking. The last and only remembrance that many have of him is that of the perennial guest on late-night television talk shows or that of the corpulent, if elegant and refined, television spokesperson for Paul Masson wines, in which his tag line on behalf of the company announced that they would “sell no wine before its time.”

However, Welles’s contribution to the arts, and film in particular, was not overlooked. He was honored with an Oscar for his life’s work at the 1970 Academy Awards; in 1975, he received the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute; and in 1982, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor. At his death in Hollywood at the age of seventy, Welles left literally dozens of unfinished or unpublished screenplays and incomplete films.

Significance

Virtually all work on the life and art of Welles alludes to his failed genius, as if he came close but never quite made it, which is an unfortunate implication. While most studies accept the brilliance of the actor, director, playwright, and admitted self-promoter, the perceived “failure” of Welles is seen in his inability to maintain that excellence or to go beyond those promising years that led up to Citizen Kane. Perhaps his failure is that he achieved so much at a young age he was twenty-six when Citizen Kane appeared that he had nowhere to go or that, as an innovator and maverick in a film industry that was and is judged by the accepted norms and conventions of its business, he could not find the support and financial backing that more conventional filmmakers enjoyed.

Certainly the strengths of Welles and strokes of brilliance were also his weaknesses. He had a restless, inexhaustible drive that could not be satisfied, even when numerous projects awaited completion. Indeed, several of his films were edited by others in his absence, and many scenes reshot with new directors because he was off on yet another venture. So too, his early successes merely confirmed the exceptional talents that he had been praised for since his childhood so that his extraordinary abilities became commonplace to a young man who knew he could do anything.

However, his imagination and innovations on stage and especially in film are undeniable. He advanced the technique of “deep focus,” wherein background action becomes as clear as that in the foreground (with the former commenting on the latter); contrasted light and shadow for psychological effect; used a fluid camera technique of “long takes” to expand the dimensions of space beyond the limits of the screen; and developed the three-dimensional use of sound, which varied the audible range of voices and sounds according to their distance from the camera or viewer. These innovations, among others, still influence directors today and speak for the creative art of one of America’s premier talents.

Further Reading

Brady, Frank. Citizen Welles. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An extensive, critical approach that is, even with its abundant anecdotes, an objective biography that credits Welles with a number of cinematic innovations.

Callow, Simon. Orson Welles. 2 vols. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995-2006. The first two volumes of a proposed extensive biography by an actor, director, and writer who endeavors to look into the many influences that may have led to Welles’s decline prior to his most famous film, Citizen Kane. The first volume covers Welles’s life and career up to and including Citizen Kane. The second volumes traces Welles’s career from the period after the release of Citizen Kane until his self-imposed exile to Europe in 1947.

Heyer, Paul. The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934-1952. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Comprehensive review of Welles’s radio career that assesses his work and its influence.

Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005. Analyzes the circumstances under which Welles made six films for Hollywood studios between 1941 and 1958 and describes how, in some cases, his work was sabotaged by studio executives.

Higham, Charles. Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. A manageable biography that ends in the last year of Welles’s life when the actor was preparing a film version of King Lear. Higham’s biography clears away many of the repeated errors begun by Welles himself of the actor-director’s life.

James, Howard. The Complete Films of Orson Welles. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol, 1985. A readable critique of the art and techniques of Welles’s filmmaking, with some insightful comments on his innovations.

Leaming, Barbara. Orson Welles, A Biography. New York: Viking, 1983. An “authorized” biography written in collaboration with Welles. While more intimate than other works on Welles, some of the events reported may, given Welles’s penchant for misinformation about his past, be suspect.

Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson Welles. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. One of the best critical examinations of Welles’s work available; the criticism of Welles’s films is excellent.

Thomson, David. Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. New York: Knopf, 1996. An extensive account of Welles’s life that is more critical than most written by an actor and authority on film. Thomson offers a number of personal observations, interpretations, and questions throughout the book that are, at times, bothersome.