| name | Orson Welles |
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| birth name | George Orson Welles |
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| birth date | May 06, 1915 |
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| birth place | |
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| death date | October 10, 1985 |
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| death place | |
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| death cause | Heart attack |
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| alma mater | Todd School for Boys |
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| occupation | Actor, film director, theatre director, screenwriter, playwright, film producer, radio personality |
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| years active | 1931–85 |
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| spouse | Virginia Nicholson (1934–40)Rita Hayworth (1943–48)Paola Mori (1955–85) |
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| height | 6'1" |
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| partner | Dolores del Río (1938–41)Oja Kodar (1966–85) |
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| parents | Richard Hodgdon Head Welles, Beatrice Ives |
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| awards | 1941 Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for ''Citizen Kane'' 1970 Academy Honorary Award |
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| influences | John Ford, William Shakespeare, Fritz Lang, Joseph Conrad |
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| influenced | Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson |
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| signature | Orson Welles signature.svg
}} |
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George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked extensively in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably ''Caesar'' (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaption of ''Julius Caesar'' and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; ''The War of the Worlds'' (1938), the most famous broadcast in the history of radio; and ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), which many critics and scholars name as the best film of all time.
After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including
an innovative adaptation of ''Macbeth'' and ''
The Cradle Will Rock'', Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938
radio adaptation of
H. G. Wells' novel ''The War of the Worlds'' performed for the radio drama anthology series ''
Mercury Theatre on the Air''. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.
His first film was ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), which he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in as Charles Foster Kane. It is often considered the greatest film ever made. Welles was always an outsider to the studio system and directed only 13 full-length films in his career. While he struggled for creative control in the face of studios, many of his films were heavily edited and others were left unreleased. His distinctive directorial style featured layered and nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. He has been praised as a major creative force and as "the ultimate auteur." Welles followed up ''Citizen Kane'' with other critically acclaimed films, including ''The Magnificent Ambersons'' in 1942, and ''Touch of Evil'' in 1958.
In 2002, Welles was voted the greatest film director of all time in two separate British Film Institute polls among directors and critics, and a wide survey of critical consensus, best-of lists, and historical retrospectives calls him the most acclaimed director of all time. Well known for his baritone voice, Welles was also a well regarded actor and was voted number 16 in AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list of the greatest American film actors of all time. He was also a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor and an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety shows in the war years.
Early life
Welles was born May 6, 1915, in
Kenosha, Wisconsin, son of Richard Hodgdon Head Welles (1873,
Missouri – December 28, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) and Beatrice (née Ives; 1882 or 1883,
Springfield, Illinois – May 10, 1924, Chicago, Illinois). He was raised Roman Catholic. Despite his parents' affluence, Welles encountered many hardships in childhood. In 1919, his parents separated and moved to Chicago. His father, who had made a fortune as the inventor of a popular bicycle lamp, became an alcoholic and stopped working. Welles's mother, a concert pianist, played during lectures by Dudley Crafts Watson at the
Chicago Art Institute to support her son and herself (the oldest Welles boy, "Dickie", had been institutionalized at an early age because he had learning difficulties). Beatrice died of
jaundice in 1924 in a Chicago hospital a few days after Welles's ninth birthday. After his mother's death, Welles ceased pursuing his interest in music. He was taken in by Dudley Crafts Watson and lived with the family at Watson's family home, "Trillium Dell", on Marshman Avenue in Highland Park, Illinois. At the age of ten, Orson with Watson's third daughter, Marjorie (of the same age), ran away from home. They were found a week later, singing and dancing for money on a street corner in Milwaukee. His father died when Orson was 15 during the summer after Orson's graduation from
Todd School for Boys, an independent school in
Woodstock, Illinois. Maurice Bernstein, a physician from Chicago, became his guardian.
At Todd School, Welles came under the influence of Roger Hill, a teacher who later became 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 his first theatrical experiments and productions there. Following graduation from Todd, Welles was awarded a scholarship to Harvard University. Rather than enrolling, he chose to travel. Later, he briefly studied for a time at the Art Institute of Chicago. He returned a number of times to Woodstock to direct his alma mater's student productions.
Early career (1931–1934)
After his father's death, Welles traveled to Europe with the aid of a small inheritance. Welles later reported that while on a walking and painting trip through Ireland, he strode into the
Gate Theatre in Dublin and claimed he was a Broadway star. The manager of Gate,
Hilton Edwards, later said he had not believed him but was impressed by his brashness and some impassioned quality in his audition. Welles made his stage debut at the Gate in 1931, appearing in ''
Jew Suss'' as the Duke. He acted to great acclaim, which reached the United States. He performed smaller supporting roles as well. On returning to the United States he found his fame ephemeral and turned to a writing project at Todd School that would become the immensely successful ''Everybody's Shakespeare'' and subsequently, ''The Mercury Shakespeare''. Welles traveled to North Africa while working on thousands of illustrations for the ''Everybody's Shakespeare'' series of educational books, a series that remained in print for decades.
An introduction by Thornton Wilder led Welles to the New York stage. In 1933, he toured in three off-Broadway productions with Katharine Cornell's company, including two roles in ''Romeo and Juliet''. Restless and impatient when the planned Broadway opening of ''Romeo and Juliet'' was canceled, Welles staged a drama festival of his own with the Todd School, inviting Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards from Dublin's Gate Theatre to appear, along with New York stage luminaries. It was a roaring success. The subsequent revival of Cornell's ''Romeo and Juliet'' brought Welles to the notice of John Houseman, who was casting for an unusual lead actor for the lead role in the Federal Theatre Project.
By 1935 Welles was supplementing his earnings in the theater as a radio actor in Manhattan, working with many of the actors who would later form the core of his Mercury Theatre. He married Chicago actress Virginia Nicholson in 1934 and that year he shot an eight-minute silent short film, ''The Hearts of Age'' with her. The couple had one daughter, Christopher. She made her only film appearance in 1948, taking the role of Macduff's son in Welles's film ''Macbeth'' and later became known as Chris Welles Feder, an author of educational materials for children.
Theatre and radio (1936–1940)
Federal Theatre Project
''Macbeth''
In 1936, the
Federal Theatre Project (part of
Roosevelt's
Works Progress Administration) put unemployed theater performers and employees to work. Welles was hired by
John Houseman and assigned to direct a play for the Federal Theatre Project's Negro Theater Unit. He offered them ''
Macbeth''. The production became known as the ''
Voodoo Macbeth'', because Welles set it in the
Haitian court of King
Henri Christophe, with voodoo witch doctors for the three
Weird Sisters.
Jack Carter played Macbeth. The
incidental music was composed by
Virgil Thomson. The play opened April 14, 1936, at the
Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and was received rapturously. It later toured the nation. When the lead actor,
Maurice Ellis, fell ill on tour, Welles quickly boarded an airplane to fly to the location and stepped into the part, playing the role in
blackface. At the age of 20, Welles was hailed as a prodigy. A few minutes of the Welles production of ''Macbeth'' was recorded on film in a 1937 documentary called ''
We Work Again''.
''Horse Eats Hat''
After the success of ''Macbeth'', Welles mounted the farce ''
Horse Eats Hat'', an adaptation by Welles and
Edwin Denby of
Eugène Labiche's play, ''Un Chapeau de Paille d'Italie''. The play was presented September 26 – December 5, 1936, at
Maxine Elliott's Theatre, New York.
Joseph Cotten was featured in his first starring role.
''The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus''
Welles consolidated his "White Hope" reputation with ''
Dr. Faustus'', which used light as a prime unifying scenic element in a nearly blacked-out stage.
''Faustus'' was presented January 8 – May 9, 1937, at Maxine Elliott's Theatre, New York.
''The Second Hurricane''
In 1937 American composer
Aaron Copland chose Welles to direct ''The Second Hurricane'', an operetta with a libretto by Edwin Denby that is one of Copland's least known works. Presented at the
Henry Street Settlement Music School in New York for the benefit of high school students, the production opened April 21, 1937, and ran for its scheduled three performances. Among the few adult performers in the production was actor
Joseph Cotten, Welles's longtime friend and collaborator, who was paid $10 for his performance.
''The Cradle Will Rock''
In 1937, Welles rehearsed
Marc Blitzstein's highly political operetta, ''
The Cradle Will Rock''. It was originally scheduled to open June 16, 1937, in its first public preview. Because of severe federal cutbacks in the Works Progress projects, the show's premiere at the
Maxine Elliott Theatre was canceled. The theater was locked and guarded to prevent any of the government-purchased materials being used for a commercial production of the work. In a last-minute move, Welles announced to waiting ticket-holders that the show was being transferred to
the Venice, about twenty blocks away. Some cast, as well as some crew and audience, walked the distance on foot. The union musicians refused to perform in a commercial theater for lower non-union government wages. The actors' union stated that the production belonged to the Federal Theater Project and could not be performed outside that context without permission. Lacking the participation of the union members, ''The Cradle Will Rock'' began with Blitzstein introducing the show and playing the piano accompaniment on stage with some cast members performing their parts from the audience. This impromptu performance was well received by its audience. It afterward played at the Venice for two weeks in the same informal way.
Mercury Theatre
Resigning from the Federal Theatre, Welles and Houseman formed the
Mercury Theatre, of which Welles became executive producer and whose repertory company eventually included actors such as
Agnes Moorehead,
Joseph Cotten,
Dolores del Río,
Ray Collins,
George Coulouris,
Frank Readick,
Everett Sloane,
Eustace Wyatt and
Erskine Sanford, all of whom would continue to work for Welles for years. The first Mercury Theatre production was a melodramatic and heavily edited version of
William Shakespeare's tragedy ''
Julius Caesar'', set in a contemporary frame of fascist Italy. Cinna the Poet dies at the hands not of a mob but of a secret police force. According to
Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna the Poet, "it stopped the show." The applause lasted more than ten minutes and the production was widely acclaimed.
In the second year of the Mercury Theater, Welles shifted his interests to radio as an actor, director and producer. He played Hamlet for CBS on The Columbia Workshop, while adapting and directing the play. In July 1937, the Mutual Network gave him a seven-week series to adapt ''Les Misérables'', which he did with great success. That September, Mutual chose Welles to play Lamont Cranston, aka ''The Shadow'', anonymously and in the summer of 1938 CBS gave him (and the Mercury Theatre) a weekly hour-long show to broadcast radio plays based on classic literary works. The show was titled ''The Mercury Theatre on the Air'', with original music by Bernard Herrmann, who would continue working with Welles on radio and in films for years.
''The War of the Worlds'' broadcast
Their October 30, 1938
radio adaptation of ''The War of the Worlds'' by
H. G. Wells brought Welles instant fame. The combination of the news bulletin form of the performance with the between-breaks dial spinning habits of listeners from the rival and far more popular ''
Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy program'' was later reported in the media to have created widespread confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction, although the extent of this confusion has recently come into question. Panic was reported to have spread (after citation from rumors) among many listeners who believed the news reports of a Martian invasion. The myth of the result created by the combination was reported as fact around the world and disparagingly mentioned by
Adolf Hitler in a public speech a few months later. The 1975
docudrama ''
The Night That Panicked America'' was based on events centering around the production of, and events that resulted from, the program.
Welles's growing fame soon drew Hollywood offers, lures which the independent-minded Welles resisted at first. ''The Mercury Theatre on the Air,'' which had been a "sustaining show" (without sponsorship) was picked up by Campbell Soup and renamed ''The Campbell Playhouse.''
On October 28, 1940, Welles met H.G. Wells in San Antonio, Texas; a local radio station KTSA recorded the conversation, which was likely the only meeting between the two.
Hollywood (1939–1948)
RKO Radio Pictures president
George Schaefer eventually offered Welles what generally is considered the greatest contract ever offered to an untried director: complete artistic control. RKO signed Welles in a two-picture deal; including script, cast, crew, and most importantly, final cut, although Welles had a budget limit for his projects. With this contract in hand, Welles (and nearly the entire Mercury Theatre troupe) moved to Hollywood. He commuted weekly to New York to maintain his commitment to ''The Campbell Playhouse''.
(DEBATE: Film historians have cast doubt on the accuracy of this claim of complete control. Based on much later access to the said contract, UK film critic
Alexander Walker averred, in a BBC radio documentary about Kane, that Welles did NOT have final cut of his films. Something that would seem to be confirmed by RKO's mashing of Welles' follow-up movie to Kane, "The Magnificent Ambersons"?).
Welles toyed with various ideas for his first project for RKO Radio Pictures, settling on an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness'', which he worked on in great detail. He planned to film the action with a subjective camera (a technique later used in the Robert Montgomery film ''Lady in the Lake''). When a budget was drawn up, RKO's enthusiasm cooled because it was greater than the previously agreed limit. RKO also declined to approve another Welles project, ''The Smiler With the Knife'', based on the Cecil Day-Lewis novel, ostensibly because RKO executives lacked faith in Lucille Ball's ability to carry the film as the leading lady.
In a sign of things to come, Welles left ''The Campbell Playhouse'' in 1940 due to creative differences with the sponsor. The show continued without him, produced by John Houseman. In perhaps another sign of things to come, Welles's first experience on a Hollywood film was narrator for RKO's 1940 production of ''The Swiss Family Robinson''.
''Citizen Kane''
Production
RKO, having rejected Welles's first two movie proposals, agreed on the third offer, ''Citizen Kane,'' for which Welles co-wrote, produced, directed, and performed the lead role.
Welles found a suitable film project in an idea he conceived with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, (who was then writing radio plays for ''The Campbell Playhouse''). Initially entitled ''The American'', it eventually became Welles's first feature film (also his most famous and honored role), ''Citizen Kane'' (1941).
Mankiewicz based his original notion on an ''exposé'' of the life of William Randolph Hearst, whom he knew socially but came to hate, having once been great friends with Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Mankiewicz had been banished from her company because of his perpetual drunkenness. Mankiewicz, a notorious gossip, exacted revenge with his unflattering depiction of Davies in ''Citizen Kane'' for which Welles bore most of the criticisms.
Kane's megalomania was modeled loosely on Robert McCormick, Howard Hughes, and Joseph Pulitzer as Welles wanted to create a broad, complex character, intending to show him in the same scenes from several points of view. The use of multiple narrative perspectives in Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness'' influenced the treatment.
Supplying Mankiewicz with 300 pages of notes, Welles urged him to write the first draft of a screenplay under John Houseman, who was posted to ensure Mankiewicz stayed sober. On Welles's instruction, Houseman wrote the opening narration as a pastiche of ''The March of Time'' newsreels. Orson Welles explained to Peter Bogdanovich about the writers working separately by saying, "I left him on his own finally, because we'd started to waste too much time haggling. So, after mutual agreements on storyline and character, Mank went off with Houseman and did his version, while I stayed in Hollywood and wrote mine." Taking these drafts, Welles drastically condensed and rearranged them, then added scenes of his own. The industry accused Welles of underplaying Mankiewicz's contribution to the script, but Welles countered the attacks by saying, "At the end, naturally, I was the one making the picture, after all—who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank's and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own."
Charles Foster Kane is based loosely on parts of Hearst's life. Nonetheless, autobiographical allusions to Welles were worked in, most noticeably in the treatment of Kane's childhood and particularly, regarding his guardianship. Welles then added features from other famous American lives to create a general and mysterious personality, rather than the narrow journalistic portrait intended by Mankiewicz, whose first drafts included scandalous claims about the death of the film director Thomas Ince.
Once the script was completed, Welles attracted some of Hollywood's best technicians, including cinematographer Gregg Toland, who walked into Welles's office and announced he wanted to work on the picture. Welles later described Toland as "the fastest cameraman who ever lived." For the cast, Welles primarily used actors from his Mercury Theatre. He invited suggestions from everyone but only if they were directed through him. Filming ''Citizen Kane'' took ten weeks.
Reaction
Mankiewicz handed a copy of the final shooting script to his friend,
Charles Lederer, husband of Welles's ex-wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as the nephew of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Gossip columnist
Hedda Hopper saw a small ad in a newspaper for a preview screening of ''Citizen Kane'' and went. Hopper, realizing immediately that the film was based on features of Hearst's life, reported this back to him and he threatened to give "Hollywood, Private Lives" if that was what it wanted. Thus began the struggle over the attempted suppression of ''Citizen Kane''.
Hearst's media outlets boycotted the film. They exerted enormous pressure on the Hollywood film community by threatening to expose fifteen years of suppressed scandals and the fact that most of the studio bosses were Jewish. At one point, the heads of the major studios jointly offered RKO the cost of the film in exchange for the negative and all existing prints, fully intending to burn them. RKO declined and the film was given a limited release. Hearst intimidated theater chains by threatening to ban advertising for any of their other films in any of his papers if they showed ''Citizen Kane''.
The film was well-received critically, with Bosley Crowther, film critic for the ''New York Times'' calling it "close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood". By the time it reached the general public, though, the publicity had waned. It garnered nine Academy Award nominations (Orson nominated as a producer, director, writer, and actor), but won only for Best Original Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles. Although it was largely ignored at the Academy Awards, ''Citizen Kane'' now is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Andrew Sarris called it "the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since ''The Birth of a Nation''."
The delay in its release and its uneven distribution contributed to its average result at the box office, making back its budget and marketing, but RKO lost any chance of a major profit. The fact that ''Citizen Kane'' ignored many Hollywood conventions also meant that the film confused and angered the 1940s cinema public. Exhibitor response was scathing; most theater owners complained bitterly about the adverse audience reaction and the many walkouts. Only a few saw fit to acknowledge Welles's artistic technique. RKO shelved the film and did not re-release it until 1956.
During the 1950s, the film came to be seen by young French film critics such as François Truffaut as exemplifying the "auteur theory", in which the director is the "author" of a film. Truffaut, Godard and others inspired by Welles's example made their own films, giving birth to the Nouvelle Vague. In the 1960s ''Citizen Kane'' became popular on college campuses as a film-study exercise and as an entertainment subject. Its frequent revivals on television, home video, and DVD have enhanced its "classic" status and ultimately it recouped its costs. The film still is considered by most film critics and historians to be one of the greatest motion pictures in cinema history.
''The Magnificent Ambersons''
Welles's second film for RKO was ''
The Magnificent Ambersons'', adapted from the
Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel by
Booth Tarkington. George Schaefer hoped to make money with this film, since he lost money with ''Citizen Kane''. ''Ambersons'' already had been adapted for ''
The Campbell Playhouse'' by Welles, for radio, and he then wrote the screen adaptation. Toland was not available, so
Stanley Cortez was named cinematographer. The meticulous Cortez, however, was slow and the film lagged behind schedule and over budget. Prior to production, Welles's contract was renegotiated, revoking his right to control the final cut.
''Journey into Fear''
At RKO's request, simultaneously, Welles worked on an adaptation of
Eric Ambler's spy thriller, ''
Journey into Fear'', which he co-wrote with
Joseph Cotten. In addition to acting in the film, Welles was also producer. Direction was credited solely to
Norman Foster. Welles later stated that they were in such a rush that the director of each scene was determined by whoever was closest to the camera.
CBS then offered Welles a new radio series called the ''Orson Welles Show''. It was a half-hour variety show of short stories, comedy skits, poetry, and musical numbers. Joining the original Mercury Theatre cast for the show was Cliff Edwards, the voice of Jiminy Cricket, "on loan from Walt Disney". The variety format was unpopular with listeners and Welles soon was forced to limit the content of the show simply to telling a one half-hour story for the entirety of each episode.
''It's All True''
To further complicate matters during the production of ''Ambersons'' and ''Journey into Fear'', Welles was approached by Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney to produce a documentary film about South America. This was at the behest of the federal government's Good Neighbor policy, a wartime propaganda effort designed to prevent Latin America from allying with the Axis powers. Welles saw his involvement as a form of national service, since his physical condition excused him from direct military service.
Expected to film the Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Welles rushed to finish the editing on ''Ambersons'' and his acting scenes in ''Journey into Fear''. Ending his CBS radio show, he lashed together a rough cut of ''Ambersons'' with Robert Wise, who had edited ''Citizen Kane'', and left for Brazil. Wise was to join him in Rio to complete the film, but never arrived. A provisional final cut arranged via phone call, telegram, and shortwave radio was previewed without Welles's approval in Pomona in a double bill, to a mostly negative audience response, particularly to the character of Aunt Fanny played by Agnes Moorehead. Whereas Schaefer argued that Welles be allowed to complete his own version of the film, and that an archival copy be kept with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, RKO disagreed. With Welles in South America, there was no practical means of having him edit the film.
As a result of the difficult financial circumstances that RKO found itself in across the period 1940–42, major changes occurred at the studio in 1942 Floyd Odlum took over control of RKO and began changing its direction. Rockefeller, the most significant backer of the Brazil project, left the RKO board of directors. Around the same time, the principal sponsor of Welles at RKO, studio president George Schaefer, resigned. The changes throughout RKO caused reevaluations of many projects. RKO took control of ''Ambersons'', formed a committee, which was ordered to edit the film into what the studio considered a commercial format. They removed fifty minutes of Welles's footage, re-shot sequences, rearranged the scene order, and added a happy ending. Koerner released the shortened film on the bottom of a double-bill with the Lupe Vélez comedy, ''Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost''. ''Ambersons'' was an expensive flop for RKO, although it received four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Agnes Moorehead.
Welles's South American documentary, entitled ''It's All True'', budgeted at one million dollars with half of its budget coming from the U.S. Government upon completion, grew in ambition and budget while Welles was in South America. While the film originally was to be a documentary on Carnaval, Welles added a new story which recreated the journey of the ''jangadeiros'', four poor fishermen who had made a journey on their open raft to petition Brazilian President Vargas about their working conditions. The four had become national folk heroes; Welles first read of their journey in ''TIME''. Their leader, Jacare, died during a filming mishap. RKO, in limited contact with Welles, attempted to rein in the production. Most of the crew and budget were withdrawn from the film. In addition, the Mercury staff was removed from the studio in the U.S.
Welles requested resources to finish the film. He was given a limited amount of black-and-white stock and a silent camera. He completed the sequence, but RKO refused to support any further production on the film. Surviving footage was released in 1993, including a rough reconstruction of the "Four Men on a Raft" segment. Meanwhile, RKO asserted in public that Welles had gone to Brazil without a screenplay and that he had squandered a million dollars. Their official company slogan for the next year was, "Showmanship in place of Genius" – which was taken as a slight against Welles.
Director for hire (1943–1946)
On returning to Hollywood, Welles found no studios interested in hiring him as a film director after the twin disasters of ''The Magnificent Ambersons'' and ''It's All True''. Welles next worked on radio. CBS offered him two weekly series, ''
Hello Americans'', based on the research he'd done in Brazil, and ''Ceiling Unlimited'', sponsored by
Lockheed, a wartime salute to advances in aviation. Both featured several members of his original Mercury Theatre troupe. Within a few months, ''Hello Americans'' was canceled and Welles was replaced as host of ''Ceiling Unlimited'' by Joseph Cotten. Welles guest-starred on a great variety of shows, notably guest-hosting
Jack Benny shows for a month in 1943. He took an increasingly active role in American and international politics and used journalism to communicate his forceful ideas widely.
In 1943, Welles married Rita Hayworth. They had one child, Rebecca Welles, and divorced five years later in 1948. In between, Welles found work as an actor in other directors' films. He starred in the 1944 film adaptation of ''Jane Eyre'', trading credit as associate producer for top billing over Joan Fontaine. He also had a cameo in the 1944 wartime salute ''Follow the Boys'', in which he performed his ''Mercury Wonder Show'' magic act and "sawed" Marlene Dietrich in half after Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn refused to allow Hayworth to perform.
In 1944, Welles was offered a new radio show, broadcast only in California, ''Orson Welles' Almanac''. It was another half-hour variety show, with Mobil Oil as sponsor. After the success of his stand-in hosting on ''The Jack Benny Show'', the focus was primarily on comedy. His hosting on the Jack Benny show included several self-deprecating jokes and story lines about his being a "genius" and overriding any ideas advanced by other cast members. The trade papers were not eager to accept Welles as a comedian, and Welles often complained on-air about the poor quality of the scripts. When Welles started his ''Mercury Wonder Show'' a few months later, traveling to armed forces camps and performing magic tricks and doing comedy, the radio show was broadcast live from the camps and the material took on a decidedly wartime flavor. Of his original Mercury actors, only Agnes Moorehead remained working with him. The series was cancelled by year's end due to poor ratings.
While he found no studio willing to hire him as a film director, Welles's popularity as an actor continued. Pabst Blue Ribbon gave Welles their radio series ''This Is My Best'' to direct, but after one month he was fired for creative differences. He started writing a political column for the ''New York Post'', again called ''Orson Welles's Almanac''. While the paper wanted Welles to write about Hollywood gossip, Welles explored serious political issues. His activism for world peace took considerable amounts of his time. The ''Post'' column eventually failed in syndication because of contradictory expectations and was dropped by the ''Post''.
Post-war work (1946–1948)
''The Stranger''
In 1946, International Pictures released Welles's film ''The Stranger'', starring Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, and Welles. Sam Spiegel produced the film, which follows the hunt for a Nazi war criminal living under an alias in America. While Anthony Veiller was credited with the screenplay, it had been rewritten by Welles and John Huston. Disputes occurred during the editing process between Spiegel and Welles. The film became a box office success and it helped his standing with the studios.
In the summer of 1946, Welles directed a musical stage version of ''Around the World in Eighty Days'', with a comedic and ironic rewriting of the Jules Verne novel by Welles, incidental music and songs by Cole Porter, and production by Mike Todd, who would later produce the successful film version with David Niven. When Todd pulled out from the lavish and expensive production, Welles alone supported the finances. When he ran out of money at one point, he convinced Columbia president Harry Cohn to send him enough to continue the show, and in exchange, Welles promised to write, produce, direct, and star in a film for Cohn for no further fee. The stage show soon failed, due to poor box-office, with Welles unable to claim the losses on his taxes. The complicated financial arrangements concerning the show, its losses, and Welles's arrangement with Cohn, resulted in a tax dispute with the IRS.
At the same time in 1946 he began two new radio series, ''The Mercury Summer Theatre'' for CBS and ''Orson Welles Commentaries'' for ABC. While ''Summer Theatre'' featured half-hour adaptations of some of the classic Mercury radio shows from the 1930s, the first episode was a condensation of his ''Around the World'' stage play, and remains the only record of Cole Porter's music for the project. Several original Mercury actors returned for the series, as well as Bernard Herrmann. It only was scheduled for the summer months, and Welles invested his earnings into his failing stage play. ''Commentaries'' was a political vehicle for him, continuing the themes from his New York Post column. Again, Welles lacked a clear focus, until the NAACP brought to his attention the case of Isaac Woodard. Welles brought significant attention to Woodard's cause. Soon Welles was being hanged in effigy in the South and theaters refused to show ''The Stranger'' in several southern states.
''The Lady from Shanghai''
The film Welles was obliged to make for Cohn in exchange for Cohn's help in completing ''Around the World in Eighty Days'' ended up being ''
The Lady from Shanghai'', filmed in 1947 for
Columbia Pictures. Intended to be a modest thriller, the budget skyrocketed after Cohn suggested that Welles's then-estranged second wife Rita Hayworth co-star.
Cohn disliked Welles's rough-cut, particularly the confusing plot and lack of close-ups, and was not in sympathy with Welles's
Brechtian use of irony and
black comedy, especially in a farcical courtroom scene. Cohn ordered extensive editing and re-shoots. After heavy editing by the studio, approximately one hour of Welles's first cut had been removed, including much of a climactic confrontation scene in an amusement park funhouse. While expressing displeasure at the cuts, Welles was appalled particularly at the musical score. The film was considered a disaster in America at the time of release, though the closing shootout in a hall of mirrors has since become one of the touchstones of
film noir. Not long after release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce.
Although ''The Lady From Shanghai'' was acclaimed in Europe, it was not embraced in the U.S. until several decades later. Influential modern critics including David Kehr have subsequently declared it a masterpiece, with Kehr calling it "the weirdest great movie ever made." A similar difference in reception on opposite sides of the Atlantic followed by greater American acceptance befell the Welles-inspired Chaplin film ''Monsieur Verdoux'', originally to be directed by Welles starring Chaplin, then directed by Chaplin with the idea credited to Welles.
''Macbeth''
Prior to 1948, Welles convinced
Republic Pictures to let him direct a low-budget version of ''
Macbeth'', which featured extremely stylized sets and costumes, and a cast of actors lip-syncing to a pre-recorded soundtrack, one of many innovative cost-cutting techniques Welles deployed in an attempt to make an epic film from
B-movie resources. The script, adapted by Welles, is a violent reworking of Shakespeare's original, freely cutting and pasting lines into new contexts via a
collage technique and recasting ''Macbeth'' as a clash of pagan and proto-Christian ideologies. Some of the voodoo trappings of the famous Welles/Houseman Negro Theatre stage adaptation are also visible, especially in the film's characterization of the
Weird Sisters, who create an effigy of Macbeth as a charm to enchant him. Of all Welles's post-''Kane'' Hollywood productions, ''Macbeth'' is stylistically closest to ''Citizen Kane'' in its use of long takes and deep focus photography. Shots of the increasingly isolated Scottish king looming in the foreground while other characters address him from deep in the background overtly reference ''Kane''.
Republic initially trumpeted the film as an important work but decided it did not care for the Scottish accents on the soundtrack and held up general release for almost a year after early negative press reaction, which included ''Life'''s comment that Welles's film "doth foully slaughter Shakespeare." Welles left for Europe, while his co-producer and lifelong supporter Richard Wilson reworked the soundtrack. Welles ultimately returned and cut twenty minutes from the film at Republic's request and recorded narration to cover the gaps. The film was decried as another disaster. ''Macbeth'' had its share of influential fans in Europe, especially the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who hailed the film's "crude, irreverent power" and careful shot design, and described the characters as haunting "the corridors of some dreamlike subway, an abandoned coal mine, and ruined cellars oozing with water."
In the late 1970s, a fully restored version of ''Macbeth'' was released that followed Welles's original vision, and all prints of the truncated theatrical release have gradually been withdrawn from circulation, turning Welles's compulsory recut version—which has the distinction of being created by the director himself—into something of a lost work.
Europe (1948–1956)
Welles left Hollywood for Europe in late 1947, enigmatically saying that he had chosen "freedom." In Italy he starred as
Cagliostro in the 1948 film ''
Black Magic''. His co-star,
Akim Tamiroff, impressed Welles so much that Tamiroff would appear in four of Welles's own productions during the 1950s and 1960s.
''The Third Man''
The following year, Welles starred as
Harry Lime in
Carol Reed's ''
The Third Man'', alongside
Joseph Cotten, his good friend and co-star from ''
Citizen Kane'', with a script by
Graham Greene and a memorable
zither score by
Anton Karas. The film was an international smash hit, but unfortunately for Welles, he had turned down a percentage of the gross in exchange for a lump-sum advance. A few years later, British radio producer
Harry Alan Towers would resurrect the Lime character for radio in the series ''
The Lives of Harry Lime''. The 1951 series included new recordings by Karas and was very successful, running for 52 weeks. Welles claimed to have written a handful of episodes—a claim disputed by Towers, who maintains they were written by
Ernest Borneman—which later would serve as the basis for the screenplay by Welles, ''
Mr. Arkadin'' (1955).
Welles also appeared as Cesare Borgia in the 1949 Italian film ''Prince of Foxes'', with Tyrone Power and Mercury Theatre alumnus Everett Sloane, and as the Mongol warrior Bayan in the 1950 film version of the novel ''The Black Rose'' (again with Tyrone Power).
''Othello''
During this time, Welles was channeling his money from acting jobs into a self-financed film version of Shakespeare's play ''
Othello''. From 1949 to 1951, Welles worked on ''
Othello'', filming on location in Europe and
Morocco. The film featured Welles's old friends,
Micheál Mac Liammóir as
Iago and
Hilton Edwards as
Desdemona's father
Brabantio.
Suzanne Cloutier starred as Desdemona and
Campbell Playhouse alumnus
Robert Coote appeared as Iago's associate Roderigo.
Filming was suspended several times as Welles ran out of funds and left to find other acting jobs, accounted in detail in MacLiammóir's published memoir ''Put Money in Thy Purse''. When it premiered at the
Cannes Film Festival it won the
Palme d'Or, but the film did not receive a general release in the United States until 1955 (by which time Welles had re-cut the first reel and re-dubbed most of the film, removing Cloutier's voice entirely), and it played only in New York and Los Angeles. The American release prints had a technically flawed soundtrack, suffering from a complete drop-out of sound at every quiet moment. Welles's daughter, Beatrice Welles-Smith, restored ''Othello'' in 1992 for a wide re-release. The restoration included reconstructing
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino's original musical score (which was inaudible) and adding ambient stereo sound effects (which weren't in the original film). The restoration went on to a successful theatrical run in America, but was the subject of great controversy among film scholars. A print of the U.S. version was released on
laserdisc in 1995 but soon withdrawn after a legal challenge by Beatrice Welles-Smith. The original Cannes version has survived but is not available commercially.
In 1952, Welles continued finding work in England after the success of the ''Harry Lime'' radio show. Harry Alan Towers offered Welles another series, ''The Black Museum'', which ran for 52 weeks with Welles as host and narrator. Director Herbert Wilcox offered Welles the part of the murdered victim in ''Trent's Last Case'', based on the novel by E. C. Bentley. In 1953, the BBC hired Welles to read an hour of selections from Walt Whitman's epic poem ''Song of Myself''. Towers hired Welles again, to play Professor Moriarty in the radio series, ''The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'', starring John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson.
Welles briefly returned to America to make his first appearance on television, starring in the ''Omnibus'' presentation of ''King Lear'', broadcast live on CBS October 18, 1953. Directed by Peter Brook, the production costarred Natasha Parry, Beatrice Straight and Arnold Moss. While Welles received good notices, he was guarded by IRS agents, prohibited to leave his hotel room when not at the studio, prevented from making any purchases, and the entire sum (less expenses) he earned went to his tax bill.
In 1954, director George More O'Ferrall offered Welles the title role in the 'Lord Mountdrago' segment of ''Three Cases of Murder'', co-starring Badel. Herbert Wilcox cast Welles as the antagonist in ''Trouble in the Glen'' opposite Margaret Lockwood, Forrest Tucker, and Victor McLaglen. Old friend John Huston cast him as Father Mapple in his 1956 film adaptation of Herman Melville's ''Moby-Dick'', starring Gregory Peck.
''Mr. Arkadin''
Welles's next turn as director was the film ''
Mr. Arkadin'' (1955), which was produced by his political mentor from the 1940s, Louis Dolivet. It was filmed in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy on a very limited budget. Based loosely on several episodes of the Harry Lime radio show, it stars Welles as a billionaire who hires a man to delve into the secrets of his past. The film stars
Robert Arden, who had worked on the Harry Lime series; Welles's third wife, Paola Mori, whose voice was dubbed by actress
Billie Whitelaw; and guest stars
Akim Tamiroff,
Michael Redgrave,
Katina Paxinou and
Mischa Auer. Frustrated by his slow progress in the editing room, producer Dolivet removed Welles from the project and finished the film without him. Eventually five different versions of the film would be released, two in Spanish and three in English. The version that Dolivet completed was retitled ''Confidential Report''. In 2005 Stefan Droessler of the Munich Filmmuseum oversaw a reconstruction of the surviving film elements. Included in a DVD box set (''The Complete Mr. Arkadin'') released by
The Criterion Collection, it is considered by Welles scholar and director
Peter Bogdanovich to be the best version of Welles's original intentions for the film.
In 1955, Welles also directed two television series for the BBC. The first was ''The Orson Welles Sketchbook'', a series of six 15-minute shows featuring Welles drawing in a sketchbook to illustrate his reminiscences for the camera (including such topics as the filming of ''It's All True'' and the Isaac Woodard case), and the second was ''Around the World with Orson Welles'', a series of six travelogues set in different locations around Europe (such as Venice, the Basque Country between France and Spain, and England). Welles served as host and interviewer, his commentary including documentary facts and his own personal observations (a technique he would continue to explore in later works). A seventh episode of this series, based on the Gaston Dominici case, was suppressed at the time by the French government, but was reconstructed after Welles's death and released to video in 1999.
In 1956, Welles completed ''Portrait of Gina''. Dissatisfied with the results—Welles recalled he had worked on it a lot and the result looked like it—he left the only print behind at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.} The film cans would remain in a lost-and-found locker at the hotel for several decades, where they were discovered after Welles's death. The work posthumously aired on German television under the title ''Viva Italia'', a 30-minute personal essay on Gina Lollobrigida and the general subject of Italian sex symbols.
Return to Hollywood (1956–1959)
In 1956, Welles returned to Hollywood, guesting on radio shows (notably as narrator of ''Tomorrow'', a nuclear holocaust drama produced by the
Federal Civil Defense Administration). He guest starred on television shows, including ''
I Love Lucy'', and began filming a projected pilot for
Desilu, owned by
Lucille Ball and her husband
Desi Arnaz, who had recently purchased the former RKO studios. The film was ''
The Fountain of Youth'', based on a story by
John Collier. Originally deemed not viable as a pilot, the film wasn't aired until 1958. It won the
Peabody Award for excellence. Welles's next feature film role was in ''
Man in the Shadow'' for
Universal Pictures in 1957, starring
Jeff Chandler. Around this time period, however, Welles began to suffer from weight problems that would eventually cause a deterioration in his health.
''Touch of Evil''
Welles stayed on at Universal to direct (and co-star with)
Charlton Heston in the 1958 film ''
Touch of Evil'', based on
Whit Masterson's novel ''
Badge of Evil''. Welles, who wrote the screenplay for the film, claimed never to have read the book. Originally only hired as an actor, Welles was promoted to director by
Universal Studios at the insistence of Charlton Heston. Reuniting many actors and technicians with whom Welles had worked in Hollywood in the 1940s (including cameraman
Russell Metty (''The Stranger''), make-up artist Maurice Siederman (''Citizen Kane''), and actors
Joseph Cotten,
Marlene Dietrich, and Akim Tamiroff), filming proceeded smoothly, with Welles finishing on schedule and on budget, and the studio bosses praising the daily rushes. Nevertheless, after the end of production, the studio re-edited the film, re-shot scenes, and shot new exposition scenes to clarify the plot. Welles wrote a 58-page memo outlining suggestions and objections, stating that the film was no longer his version—it was the studio's, but as such, he was still prepared to help with it. The studio followed a few of the ideas, but cut another 30 minutes from the film and released it. The film was widely praised across Europe, awarded the top prize at the
Brussels World's Fair.
In 1978, a longer preview version of the film was discovered and released. In 1998, editor Walter Murch and producer Rick Schmidlin, consulting Welles's memo, used a workprint version to attempt to create a version of the film as close as possible to that Welles outlined in the memo.
As Universal reworked ''Touch of Evil'', Welles began filming his adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes' novel ''Don Quixote'' in Mexico, starring Mischa Auer as Quixote and Akim Tamiroff as Sancho Panza. While filming would continue in fits and starts for several years, Welles would never complete the project.
Welles continued acting, notably in ''The Long, Hot Summer'' (1958) and ''Compulsion'' (1959), but soon returned to Europe.
Return to Europe (1959–1970)
He continued shooting ''Don Quixote'' in Spain and Italy, but replaced Mischa Auer with Francisco Reiguera, and resumed acting jobs.
In Italy in 1959, Welles directed his own scenes as
King Saul in Richard Pottier's film ''David and Goliath''. In Hong Kong he co-starred with
Curt Jürgens in
Lewis Gilbert's film ''
Ferry to Hong Kong''. In 1960, in Paris he co-starred in
Richard Fleischer's film
Crack in the Mirror. In
Yugoslavia he starred in
Richard Thorpe's film ''The Tartars'' and
Veljko Bulajić's "
Battle of Neretva".
Throughout the 1960s, filming continued on ''Quixote'' on-and-off until the decade, as Welles evolved the concept, tone and ending several times. Although he had a complete version of the film shot and edited at least once, he would continue toying with the editing well into the 1980s, he never completed a version film he was fully satisfied with, and would junk existing footage and shoot new footage. (In one case, he had a complete cut ready 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 10 reels of this version.) As the process went on, Welles gradually voiced all of the characters himself and provided narration. In 1992, the director Jesús Franco constructed a film out of the portions of ''Quixote'' left behind by Welles. Some of the film stock had decayed badly. While the Welles footage was greeted with interest, the post-production by Franco was met with harsh criticism.
In 1961 Welles directed ''In the Land of Don Quixote'', a series of eight half-hour episodes for the Italian television network RAI. Similar to the ''Around the World with Orson Welles'' series, they presented travelogues of Spain and included Welles's wife, Paola, and their daughter, Beatrice. Though Welles was fluent in Italian, the network was not interested in him providing Italian narration because of his accent, and the series sat unreleased until 1964, by which time the network had added Italian narration of its own. Ultimately, versions of the episodes were released with the original musical score Welles had approved, but without the narration.
''The Trial''
In 1962 Welles directed his adaptation of ''
The Trial'', based on
the novel by
Franz Kafka and produced by
Alexander Salkind and
Michael Salkind. The cast included
Anthony Perkins as Josef K,
Jeanne Moreau,
Romy Schneider,
Paola Mori and
Akim Tamiroff. While filming exteriors in
Zagreb, Welles was informed that the Salkinds had run out of money, meaning that there could be no set construction. No stranger to shooting on found locations, Welles soon filmed the interiors in the
Gare d'Orsay, at that time an abandoned railway station in Paris. Welles thought the location possessed a "
Jules Verne modernism" and a melancholy sense of "waiting", both suitable for Kafka. The film failed at the box-office.
Peter Bogdanovich would later observe that Welles found the film riotously funny. During the filming, Welles met
Oja Kodar, who would later become his muse, star and mistress for the last twenty years of his life. Welles also stated in an interview with the BBC that it was his best film.
Welles played a film director in ''La Ricotta'' (1963)—Pier Paolo Pasolini's segment of the ''Ro.Go.Pa.G.'' movie, although his renowned voice was dubbed by Italian writer Giorgio Bassani. He continued taking what work he could find acting, narrating or hosting other people's work, and began filming ''Chimes at Midnight'', which was completed in 1966. Filmed in Spain, it was a condensation of five Shakespeare plays, telling the story of Falstaff and his relationship with Prince Hal. The cast included Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Jeanne Moreau, Fernando Rey and Margaret Rutherford, with narration by Ralph Richardson. Music was again by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. Jess Franco served as second unit director.
''Chimes at Midnight''
''Chimes at Midnight'' was based on Welles's play ''
Five Kings'' which condensed five of Shakespeare's plays into one show in order to focus on the story of
Falstaff. Welles produced the show in New York in 1939 but the opening night, where part 1 was acted, was a disaster and part 2 was never put on. He revamped the show and revisited it in 1960 at the
Gate Theatre in Dublin. But again, it was not successful. However, this later production was used as the base for the movie. The script contained text from five plays: primarily ''
Henry IV, Part 1'' and ''
Henry IV, Part 2'', but also ''
Richard II'', ''
Henry V'', and ''
The Merry Wives of Windsor''.
Keith Baxter played Prince Hal, and internationally respected Shakespearean interpreter,
John Gielgud, played the King, Henry IV. The film's narration, spoken by
Ralph Richardson, is taken from the chronicler
Raphael Holinshed. According to
Jeanne Moreau, Welles delayed filming for two weeks due to stage fright. Welles held this film in high regard and considered it, along with ''
The Trial'', his best work. As he remarked in 1982, "If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I'd offer up."
In 1966, Welles directed a film for French television, an adaptation of ''The Immortal Story'', by Karen Blixen. Released in 1968, it stars Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio and Norman Eshley. The film had a successful run in French theaters. At this time Welles met Oja Kodar again, and gave her a letter he had written to her and had been keeping for four years; they would not be parted again. They immediately began a collaboration both personal and professional. The first of these was an adaptation of Blixen's ''The Heroine'', meant to be a companion piece to ''The Immortal Story'' and starring Kodar. Unfortunately, funding disappeared after one day's shooting. After completing this film, he appeared in a brief cameo as Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of ''A Man for All Seasons''—a role for which he won considerable acclaim.
In 1967 Welles began directing ''The Deep'', based on the novel ''Dead Calm'' by Charles Williams and filmed off the shore of Yugoslavia. The cast included Jeanne Moreau, Laurence Harvey and Kodar. Personally financed by Welles and Kodar, they could not obtain the funds to complete the project, and it was abandoned a few years later after the death of Harvey. The surviving footage was eventually edited and released by the Filmmuseum München. In 1968 Welles began filming a TV special for CBS under the title ''Orson's Bag'', combining travelogue, comedy skits and a condensation of Shakespeare's play ''The Merchant of Venice'' with Welles as Shylock. Funding for the show sent by CBS to Welles in Switzerland was seized by the IRS. Without funding, the show was not completed. The surviving film clips portions were eventually released by the Filmmuseum München.
In 1969, Welles authorized the use of his name for a cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Orson Welles Cinema remained in operation until 1986, with Welles making a personal appearance there in 1977. Also in 1969 he played a supporting role in John Huston's ''The Kremlin Letter''. Drawn by the numerous offers he received to work in television and films, and upset by a tabloid scandal reporting his affair with Kodar, Welles abandoned the editing of ''Don Quixote'' and moved back to America in 1970.
Final years (1970–1985)
Welles returned to Hollywood, where he continued to self-finance his own film and television projects. While offers to act, narrate and host continued, Welles also found himself in great demand on television talk shows. He made frequent appearances for
Dick Cavett,
Johnny Carson,
Dean Martin and
Merv Griffin.
Welles's primary focus during his final years was ''The Other Side of the Wind'', an unfinished project that was filmed intermittently between 1970 and 1976. Written by Welles, it is the story of an aging film director (John Huston) looking for funds to complete his final film. The cast includes Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, Norman Foster, Edmond O'Brien, Cameron Mitchell and Dennis Hopper. Financed by Iranian backers, ownership of the film fell into a legal quagmire after the Shah of Iran was deposed. While there have been several reports of all the legal disputes concerning ownership of the film being settled, enough disputes still exist to prevent its release.
Welles portrayed Louis XVIII of France in the 1970 film ''Waterloo'', and narrated the beginning and ending scenes of the historical comedy ''Start the Revolution Without Me'' (1970).
In 1971 Welles directed a short adaptation of ''Moby-Dick'', a one-man performance on a bare stage, reminiscent of his 1955 stage production ''Moby Dick—Rehearsed''. Never completed, it was eventually released by the Filmmuseum München. He also appeared in ''La Décade prodigieuse'', co-starring with Anthony Perkins and directed by Claude Chabrol, based on a detective novel by Ellery Queen. That same year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an honorary award "For superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures". Welles pretended to be out of town and sent John Huston to claim the award. Huston criticized the Academy for awarding Welles while they refused to give him any work.
In 1972, Welles acted as on-screen narrator for the film documentary version of Alvin Toffler's 1970 book ''Future Shock''. Working again for a British producer, Welles played Long John Silver in director John Hough's ''Treasure Island'' (1972), an adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, which had been the second story broadcast by ''The Mercury Theatre on the Air'' in 1938. Welles also contributed to the script, his writing credit was attributed to the pseudonym 'O. W. Jeeves'. Welles original recorded dialog was re dubbed by Robert Rietty.
In 1973, Welles completed ''F for Fake'', a personal essay film about art forger Elmyr de Hory and the biographer Clifford Irving. Based on an existing documentary by François Reichenbach, it included new material with Oja Kodar, Joseph Cotten, Paul Stewart and William Alland. An excerpt of Welles's 1930s ''War of the Worlds'' broadcast was recreated for this film, however none of the dialogue heard in the film actually matches what was originally broadcast. Welles filmed a five minute trailer, rejected in the US that featured several shots of a topless Kodar.
Welles hosted and narrated a syndicated anthology series, ''Orson Welles's Great Mysteries,'' over the 1973–1974 television season. It did not last beyond that season; however, the program could be perceived as a television revival of the Mercury Theatre whose executive producer Welles had been in the 1930s and 1940s. 1974 also saw Welles lending his voice for that year's remake of Agatha Christie's classic thriller ''Ten Little Indians'' produced by his former associate, Harry Alan Towers and starring an international cast that included Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer and Herbert Lom.
In 1975, Welles narrated the documentary ''Bugs Bunny: Superstar'', focusing on Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1940s. Also in 1975, the American Film Institute presented Welles with its third Lifetime Achievement Award (the first two going to director John Ford and actor James Cagney). At the ceremony, Welles screened two scenes from the nearly finished ''The Other Side of the Wind''. In 1978 Welles narrated the theatrical release The Late, Great Planet Earth.
In 1976, Paramount Television purchased the rights for the entire set of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories for Orson Welles. Welles had once wanted to make a series of Nero Wolfe movies, but Rex Stout – who was leery of Hollywood adaptations during his lifetime after two disappointing 1930s films – turned him down. Paramount planned to begin with an ABC-TV movie and hoped to persuade Welles to continue the role in a mini-series. Frank D. Gilroy was signed to write the television script and direct the TV movie on the assurance that Welles would star, but by April 1977 Welles had bowed out. In 1980 the Associated Press reported "the distinct possibility" that Welles would star in a Nero Wolfe TV series for NBC television. Again, Welles bowed out of the project due to creative differences and William Conrad was cast in the role.
In 1979 Welles completed his documentary ''Filming Othello'', which featured Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards. Made for West German television, it was also released in theaters. That same year, Welles completed his self-produced pilot for ''The Orson Welles Show'' television series, featuring interviews with Burt Reynolds, Jim Henson and Frank Oz and guest-starring The Muppets and Angie Dickinson. Unable to find network interest, the pilot was never broadcast. In 1979 Welles also appeared in the biopic ''The Secret of Nikola Tesla'', and a cameo in ''The Muppet Movie'' as Lew Lord.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Welles participated in a series of famous television commercial advertisements. For two years he was on-camera spokesman for the Paul Masson Vineyards, and sales grew by one third during the time Welles intoned what became a popular catchphrase: "We will sell no wine before its time." He was also the voice behind the long-running Carlsberg "Probably the best lager in the world" campaign, promoted Domecq sherry on British television and provided narration on adverts for Findus, though the actual adverts have been overshadowed by a famous blooper reel of voice recordings, known as the Frozen Peas reel.
In 1981, Welles hosted the documentary ''The Man Who Saw Tomorrow'', about Renaissance-era prophet Nostradamus. In 1982 the BBC broadcast ''The Orson Welles Story'' in the ''Arena'' series. Interviewed by Leslie Megahey, Welles examined his past in great detail, and several people from his professional past were interviewed as well. It was reissued in 1990 as ''With Orson Welles: Stories of a Life in Film''. Welles provided narration for the tracks "Defender" from Manowar's album Fighting the World and "Dark Avenger" on Manowar's 1982 album, ''Battle Hymns''. His name was misspelled on the latter album, as he was credited as "Orson Wells".
During the 1980s, Welles worked on such film projects as ''The Dreamers'', based on two stories by Isak Dinesen and starring Oja Kodar, and ''The Orson Welles Magic Show'', which reused material from his failed TV pilot. Another project he worked on was ''Filming The Trial'', the second in a proposed series of documentaries examining his feature films. While much was shot for these projects, none of them was completed. All of them were eventually released by the Filmmuseum München.
In 1984, Welles narrated the short-lived television series ''Scene of the Crime''. During the early years of ''Magnum, P.I.'', Welles was the voice of the unseen character Robin Masters, a famous writer and playboy. Welles's death forced this minor character to largely be written out of the series. In an oblique homage to Welles, the ''Magnum, P.I.'' producers ambiguously concluded that story arc by having one character accuse another of having hired an actor to portray Robin Masters. He also, in this penultimate year released a music single, titled "I Know What It Is To Be Young (But You Don't Know What It Is To Be Old)", which he recorded under Italian label Compagnia Generale del Disco. The song was performed with the Nick Perito Orchestra and the Ray Charles Singers and produced by Jerry Abbott who was father to famed Metal Guitarist Dimebag Darrell.
The last film roles before Welles's death included voice work in the animated films ''The Enchanted Journey'' (1984) and ''The Transformers: The Movie'' (1986), in which he played the planet-eating robot Unicron. His last film appearance was in Henry Jaglom's 1987 independent film ''Someone to Love'', released after his death but produced before his voice-over in ''Transformers: The Movie''. His last television appearance was on the television show ''Moonlighting''. He recorded an introduction to an episode entitled "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice", which was partially filmed in black and white. The episode aired five days after his death and was dedicated to his memory.
Personal life
Relationships and family
In 1934, Welles eloped with Chicago-born actress and socialite Virginia Nicolson. From around 1937 Welles embarked on a string of extra-marital affairs with various ballerinas he had met on Broadway, and the couple divorced in 1940 after Welles's affair with
Vera Zorina was vaguely mentioned in
Walter Winchell's column.
Since 1932, Welles had fallen in love with the older Mexican actress, Dolores del Río. They lived a torrid romance between 1938 and 1942. They acted together in the movie ''Journey into Fear'' (1943) but the affair ended soon after filming ended. Rebecca Welles, the daughter of Welles and Hayworth, met Dolores in 1954 and said: "My father considered her the great love of his life...She was a living legend in the history of my family". Welles once remarked that he was incredibly impressed by her lingerie, which had been handmade by nuns in France.
Welles married Rita Hayworth in 1943. The couple became estranged by 1946 – Welles blamed Hayworth for making unfounded accusations of infidelity, and after he was turned out of the marital bed he then actually started to have affairs, which in turn prompted Hayworth to have affairs of her own. They briefly reconciled in 1947 during the making of ''The Lady from Shanghai'', before finally separating. In 1948 Hayworth filed for divorce, her reason to the press being, "I can't take his genius any more." During his last interview and only five hours before his death, Welles answered Merv Griffin's suggestive comment "But one of your wives—oh, I have envied you so many years for Rita Hayworth", by calling her "one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived" and saying that he was "lucky enough to have been with her longer than any of the other men in her life."
In 1955 Welles married Italian actress Paola Mori (née Countess Paola di Girifalco), an Italian aristocrat. The couple had a "shotgun wedding" after Welles impregnated Mori (who was then the leading lady in his film ''Mr. Arkadin''), and Mori's Catholic parents feared for their family's reputation if the two did not marry. They were wed in London on May 8, 1955, and their daughter was born in New York on November 13, 1955, six months later. Estranged for decades, the couple never divorced.
Croatian-born actress Oja Kodar became Welles's longtime companion both personally and professionally from 1966 onwards, and they lived together for the last 19 years of his life. They first met in Zagreb in 1962, while Welles was filming ''The Trial'', and embarked on a passionate, short-lived affair which ended when Paola Mori had a health scare and Welles returned to his wife. Kodar assumed Welles had left for good, and Welles hired a private detective to track down Kodar, to no avail. Three years passed, and Kodar was by then living in Paris and in a relationship with a struggling young actor. When they saw a press feature that Welles was in Paris, the young actor persuaded a reluctant Kodar to use her influence with Welles to get him a job. When she telephoned him, Welles immediately rushed to her hotel room, broke down the door, and pulled out a small metal box from his jacket. It contained a love letter to her. He had been carrying it every day for the last three years, in case he might meet her again one day.
With the passing years, Welles's domestic arrangements became more complicated. From 1966 he always maintained at least two separate homes, one with Kodar, the other with Mori and their daughter Beatrice, but he was an infrequent visitor to the home with Mori, citing the demands of work. In the 1960s and 1970s he shared houses just outside Paris and Madrid with Kodar. Although British tabloids reported his affair with Kodar as early as 1969 (which was a factor in his moving permanently to the USA in 1970), both Mori and Beatrice remained oblivious as to Kodar's existence until 1984. Welles set up a home with Mori and Beatrice in Nevada (first in Sedona, then in Las Vegas), ostensibly because the climate would be good for his asthma. But while they lived in Nevada, he spent most of his time in Los Angeles, where he openly shared a house with Kodar. When Mori found out about Kodar in 1984, she threw him out of their Nevada house, and she and Beatrice did not see him for the last year of his life, although they still talked regularly on the telephone.
This situation had serious ramifications for the copyright status of his work after his death. Welles left Kodar his Los Angeles home and the rights to his unfinished films, and turned the rest over to Mori. Mori contended that she should have been left everything, and a year after Welles's death, Mori and Kodar finally agreed on the settlement of his will. On the way to their meeting to sign the papers, however, Mori was killed in a car accident in August 1986. Mori's half of the estate was inherited by Beatrice, who refused to come to an arrangement with Kodar, who she blames for undermining her parents' marriage. Legal wranglings between the two have persisted for over 25 years, leading to complex ongoing legal battles over who owns his unfinished films – legal action by Beatrice has at least three times prevented Welles's last film, ''The Other Side of the Wind'', from being completed.
Welles had three daughters from his marriages: Christopher Welles Feder (born March 27, 1938, with Virginia Nicolson); Rebecca Welles Manning (December 17, 1944 – October 14, 2004, with Rita Hayworth), and Beatrice Welles (born November 13, 1955, with Paola Mori). His only known son, British director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 5th baronet), is from Welles's affair with Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, then the wife of Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, 4th baronet. In her autobiography, ''In My Father's Shadow'', Welles Feder wrote about being a childhood friend and neighbor of Lindsay-Hogg's and always suspecting he might be her half-brother.
After the death of Rebecca Welles Manning in 2004, a man named Marc McKerrow was revealed to be her biological son, and so the direct descendant of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. McKerrow's reactions to the revelation and his meeting with Oja Kodar are documented in the 2008 film ''Prodigal Sons''.
Some of Welles's claimed familial ties have not held up under scrutiny. Despite the persistent urban legend, promoted by Welles himself, he was not the great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln's wartime Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles. Perhaps the genesis of the myth dates to a 1970 interview on ''The Dick Cavett Show'' during which Welles remarks about his venerable great-grandfather Gideon Welles. Orson Welles's father was Richard Head Welles, son of Richard Jones Welles; Gideon Welles had no son by that name. His sons were Hubert (1833–1862), John Arthur (1845–1883), Thomas G. (1846–1892), and Edgar Thaddeus Welles (1843–1914).
Physical characteristics
Welles achieved a height of six feet at the age of fourteen. Peter Noble's biography describes him as "A magnificent figure of a man, over six feet tall, handsome, with flashing eyes and a gloriously resonant speaking-voice" According to a 1941
physical exam taken when he was 26, Welles was 6 feet (183 cm) tall and weighed . His eyes were brown. Other sources cite that he was tall, but the slates from costume tests made during the 1940s show him as . Welles gained a significant amount of weight in his 40s, eventually rendering him
morbidly obese, at one point weighing nearly four hundred pounds (181.4 kg). His obesity was severe to the point that it restricted his ability to travel, aggravated other health conditions, including his
asthma, and even required him to go on a diet in order to play the famously portly
Sir John Falstaff. Some have attributed his over-eating and drinking to depression over his marginalization by the Hollywood system.
Religious beliefs
In April 1982,
Merv Griffin interviewed Welles and asked 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." After the success of his 1941 film ''Citizen Kane'', Welles announced that his next film would be about the life of Jesus, and that he would play the lead role. However, Welles never got around to making the film. He narrated the Christian documentary ''
The Late, Great Planet Earth'' as well as the 1961 Biblical film about the life of Christ, ''
King of Kings''.
Politics
Welles was politically active from the beginning of his career. He remained a man of 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. 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). In 1970, Welles narrated (but did not write) a satirical political record on the administration of President
Richard Nixon entitled ''The Begatting of the President''. He was also an early and outspoken critic of American racism and the practice of
segregation.
In the 2006 book, ''Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?'', writer Joseph McBride made several controversial claims about Welles. Though Welles said otherwise during his lifetime, McBride claimed Welles left America in the late 1940s to escape McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. McBride also claimed, in spite of the sexual content of Welles's contemporary work (''F for Fake'' and the unfinished ''Other Side of the Wind'' which contained an explicit – for the time – sex scene involving Oja Kodar), that Welles was extremely puritanical about sex based on his comment to Peter Bogdanovich that ''The Last Picture Show'' was "a dirty movie".
Welles once told ''Cahiers du cinéma'' about sex in film, "In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God."
Death and funeral
On October 10, 1985, Welles did his final interview on ''
The Merv Griffin Show''. He died several hours later of a heart attack at his home in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California, and was found slumped over his typewriter, working on a new film script. His death came on the same day as his ''
Battle of Neretva'' co-star
Yul Brynner. He was cremated two days later.
Welles's funeral was the subject of some dissent among his family. It was handled by his estranged widow Paola Mori (she had not seen him since she had thrown him out of their family home a year earlier) and his youngest daughter Beatrice Welles. On the pretext that "daddy left no money for funerals or anything else", Beatrice planned for it to be "a simple affair" which deliberately excluded "Hollywood types". Welles's eldest daughter Chris has written of her horror at arriving in "a slum" district of downtown Los Angeles and finding that the funeral took place in a building that "looked more like a hot sheets motel than a funeral home", and that the funeral was booked in a small, bare, sparsely furnished shabby back room which "had the look of a cheap motel room", and had no music or flowers. No ministers, speakers or ceremony had been organized, and so the mourners simply sat in silence by Welles's cremated remains until Welles's 90-year-old former teacher and mentor Roger Hill gave an impromptu eulogy. Paola Mori had refused to allow most of Welles's friends to attend, limiting the mourners to just nine: herself, Welles's three daughters, Roger Hill, and three of Welles's friends (Gary Graver, Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cuto and Greg Garrison), as well as the doctor who had signed Welles's death certificate. Welles's companion for the last 20 years, Oja Kodar, was not invited, nor were either of his ex-wives. Regarding the proceedings, Hill exclaimed at the funeral itself "This is awful! Awful!" Hill took particular exception to Welles having been cremated to save money, since "Orson never wanted to be cremated. He hated the whole idea of cremation. Thank God he doesn't know what they did to him!"
Welles's ashes were taken to Ronda, Spain, where they were buried in an old well covered by flowers, within the rural property of a long time friend, retired bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez.
Filmography
Unfinished projects
Welles's reliance on self-production meant that many of his later projects were filmed piecemeal or were not completed. Welles financed his later projects through his own fundraising activities. He often also took on other work to obtain money to fund his own films.
''Don Quixote''
In the mid-1950s, Welles began work on ''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. Filming stopped with the death of
Francisco Reiguera, the actor playing Quixote, in 1969. Orson Welles continued editing the film into the early 1970s. At the time of his death, the film remained largely a collection of footage in various states of editing. The project and more importantly Welles's conception of the project changed radically over time. A version of the film was created from available fragments in 1992 and released to a very negative reception.
''The Merchant of Venice''
In 1969 Welles was given another TV commission to film a condensed adaptation of ''
The Merchant of Venice''. Although Welles had actually completed the film by 1970 the finished negative was later mysteriously stolen from his Rome production office.
''The Other Side of the Wind''
In 1970 Welles began shooting ''The Other Side of the Wind''. The film relates the efforts of a film director (played by
John Huston) to complete his last Hollywood picture and is largely set at a lavish party. By 1972 the filming was reported by Welles as being "96% complete", though it is likely that Welles had only edited about 40 minutes of the film by 1979. In that year, legal complications over the ownership of the film forced the negative into a Paris vault where it remained until 2004, when
Peter Bogdanovich (who also acted in the film) announced his intention to complete the production. As of 2009, legal complications over the Welles estate have kept the film from being finished or released. Some footage is included in the documentaries ''Working with Orson Welles'' (1993) and ''Orson Welles: One Man Band'' (1995).
Other unfinished projects
''
Heart of Darkness'': Welles's projected first film in 1940, planned in extreme detail and with some test shots filmed. (The footage is now lost.) It was planned to be entirely shot in
long takes from the point of view of the narrator,
Marlow, who would be played by Welles, seeing his own reflection in the window as his boat sailed down river. The project was abandoned because it could not be delivered on budget, and ''
Citizen Kane'' was made instead.
''It's All True'': Welles did not originally want to direct this 1942 documentary on South America, but after its abandonment by RKO, he spent much of the 1940s attempting to buy the negative of his material from RKO, so that he could edit and release it in some form. The footage remained unseen in vaults for decades, and was assumed lost. Over 50 years later, some (but not all) of the surviving material saw release in the 1993 documentary ''It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles''.
''Monsieur Verdoux'': In 1944, Welles wrote the first-draft script of this film, which he also intended to direct. Charlie Chaplin initially agreed to star in it, but later changed his mind, citing never having been directed by someone else in a feature before. Chaplin bought the film rights and made the film himself in 1947, with some changes (Welles said the gallows scenes were written by Chaplin, but that much of the film was unchanged from his own script). The final film credits Chaplin with the script, "based on an idea by Orson Welles".
''
Cyrano de Bergerac'': Welles spent around nine months c. 1947-8 co-writing the screenplay for this along with
Ben Hecht, a project Welles was assigned to direct for
Alexander Korda. He began scouting for locations in Europe whilst filming ''
Black Magic'', but Korda was short of money, so sold the rights to Columbia pictures, who eventually dismissed Welles from the project, and then sold the rights on to
United Artists, who in turn
made a film version in 1950, which was not based on Welles's script.
''
Around the World in Eighty Days'': After Welles's elaborate musical stageshow of this
Jules Verne novel, encompassing 38 different sets, he began shooting some test footage in Morocco for a film version in 1947. The footage was never edited, funding never came through, and Welles abandoned the project. Nine years later, the stage show's producer
Mike Todd made
his own award-winning film version of the book.
''
Moby Dick—Rehearsed'': a film version of Welles's 1955 London meta-play, starring
Gordon Jackson,
Christopher Lee,
Patrick McGoohan, and with Welles as
Ahab. Using bare, minimalist sets, Welles alternated between a cast of nineteenth-century actors rehearsing a production of ''Moby Dick'', with scenes from ''Moby Dick'' itself.
Kenneth Williams, a cast member who was apprehensive about the entire project, recorded in his autobiography that Welles's dim, atmospheric stage lighting made some of the footage so dark as to be unwatchable. The entire play was filmed, but is now presumed lost. The recording was made during one weekend at the
Hackney Empire theatre.
''
Histoires extraordinaires'': The producers of this 1968
anthology film, based on short stories by
Edgar Allan Poe, announced in June 1967 that Welles would direct one segment based on both "
Masque of the Red Death" and "
The Cask of Amontillado" for the omnibus film. Welles withdrew in September 1967 and was replaced. The script, written in English by Welles and
Oja Kodar, is in the Filmmuseum Munchen collection.
''One-Man Band'': This
Monty Python-esque spoof in which Welles plays all but one of the characters (including two characters in
drag), was made around 1968-9. Welles intended this completed sketch to be one of several items in a television special on London. Other items filmed for this special – all included in the "One Man Band" documentary by his partner
Oja Kodar – comprised a sketch on Winston Churchill (played in silhouette by Welles), a sketch on peers in a stately home, a feature on
London gentlemen's clubs, and a sketch featuring Welles being mocked by his snide
Savile Row tailor (played by
Charles Gray).
''Treasure Island'': Welles wrote two screenplays for this in the 1960s, and was eager to seek financial backing to direct it. Eventually, his own screenplay (under the pseudonym of O.W. Jeeves) was further rewritten, and formed the basis of the 1972 film version directed by John Hough, in which Welles played Long John Silver.
''
The Deep'': An adaptation of
Charles Williams' ''
Dead Calm''. The picture was entirely set on two boats and shot mostly in close-ups, and was filmed off the coasts of
Yugoslavia and
the Bahamas, between 1966 and 1969, with all but one scene completed. Originally planned as commercially viable thriller, to show that Welles could make a popular, successful film. It was put on hold in 1970 when Welles worried that critics would not respond favourably to this film as his theatrical follow-up to the much-lauded ''
Chimes at Midnight'', and Welles focused instead on ''
F for Fake''. It was abandoned altogether in 1973 due to the death of its star
Laurence Harvey. The Munich Film Museum holds a restored copy, with title cards filling out the missing scene.
''
Saint Jack''. In 1978 Welles was lined up by his long-time protégé
Peter Bogdanovich (who was then acting as Welles's ''de facto'' agent) to direct this adaptation of the 1973
Paul Theroux novel about an American pimp in Singapore.
Hugh Hefner and Bogdnovich's then-partner
Cybill Shepherd were both attached to the project as producers, with Hefner providing finance through his
Playboy productions. However, both Hefner and Shepherd became convinced that Bogdanovich himself would be a more commercially viable director than Welles, and insisted that Bogdanovich take over. Since Bogdanovich was also in need of work after a series of box office flops, he agreed. When the film was finally made in 1979 by Bogdanovich and Hefner (but without Welles or Shepherd's participation), Welles felt betrayed and according to Bogdanovich the two "drifted apart a bit".
''Filming The Trial'': After the success of his 1978 film ''Filming Othello'' made for West German television, and mostly consisting of a monologue to the camera, Welles began shooting scenes for this follow-up film, but never completed it. What Welles did film was an 80 minute question-and-answer session in 1981 with film students asking about the film. The footage was kept by Welles's cinematographer
Gary Graver, who donated it to the Munich Film Museum, which then pieced it together with Welles's trailer for the film, into an 83 minute film which is occasionally screened at film festivals.
''The Big Brass Ring'': A script of this project was eventually adapted and filmed by George Hickenlooper in 1999 as a play-within-a-film, about Orson Welles's production of the play. Welles's complete screenplay was one of his last projects, written in the early 1980s. During the last years of his life, Welles struggled to get financing for the planned film; however, his efforts at casting Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, and Paul Newman as the main character were unsuccessful. All of the actors turned down the role for various reasons.
'' Cradle Will Rock'': Welles planned on writing and directing a film centered around the 1937 staging of ''The Cradle Will Rock''. Rupert Everett was slated to play the young Welles. However, Welles was unable to acquire funding. Tim Robbins later directed a similar film, but it was not based on Welles' script.
''King Lear'': At the time of his death, Welles was in talks with a French production company to direct a film version of the Shakespeare play, in which he would also play the title role.
An adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel ''Ada'' for which Welles flew to Paris to discuss the project personally with the Russian author.
Awards and honors
The American Film Institute ranked ''Citizen Kane'' as the greatest American movie. These other Welles films were nominated for their list: ''The Magnificent Ambersons'' (1942, director/producer/screenwriter); ''The Third Man'' (1949, actor); ''Touch of Evil'' (1958, actor/director/screenwriter); and ''A Man for All Seasons'' (1966, actor).
''Citizen Kane'' was nominated for numerous prizes at the 1941 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role. The only Oscar won, however, was Best Original Screenplay, which Welles shared with Herman J. Mankiewicz.
''The Magnificent Ambersons'' was nominated for four 1942 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
''The Stranger'' was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1947.
''Othello'' won the Palme d'Or at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.
In 1968 Welles was nominated for Best Foreign Actor in a Leading Role at the 21st British Academy Film Awards for his performance in ''Chimes at Midnight''.
Welles was given the first Career Golden Lion award in the Venice Film Festival in 1970.
In 1970, Welles was given an
Academy Honorary Award for "superlative and distinguished service in the making of motion pictures." Welles did not attend the ceremony: "I didn't go because I feel like a damn fool at those things. I feel foolish, really foolish. ... I made piece of film and said that I was in Spain, and thanked them."
In 1970, he was awarded the French
Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian decoration in France. Welles was also a distinguished Foreign Member of the
Académie française, succeeded by
Peter Ustinov.
Welles was given the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award in 1975.
In 1978, Welles was presented with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Career Achievement Award.
In 1979, Welles was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.
In 1982, Welles was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture at the Golden Globe Awards for his role in ''Butterfly'', and won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording for his role on ''Donovan's Brain''.
Welles was awarded a Fellowship of the British Film Institute in 1983.
In 1984, Welles was given the Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award.
The 1992 audiobook version of ''
This is Orson Welles'' by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich was nominated for a
Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album.
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Welles as the 16th Greatest Male Star of All Time.
When asked to describe Welles's influence, Jean-Luc Godard remarked: "Everyone will always owe him everything." (Ciment, 42)
A highly divergent genus of Hawaiian spiders "Orsonwelles" is named in his honor (Hormiga et al. 2003)
He won three Grammy Awards, each win in the category of Best Spoken Word Recording: in 1976, for "Great American Documents" (shared with Helen Hayes, Henry Fonda and James Earl Jones; in 1978, for the original motion picture soundtrack to ''Citizen Kane''; and in 1981, for a recording of ''Donovan's Brain''.
In 2008 a statue of Welles sculpted by
Oja Kodar was erected in the town of
Split, Croatia.
Popular culture
One of the recurring celebrity characters on the influential Canadian sketch comedy TV show ''Second City Television'' was John Candy's impersonation of Welles. On SCTV, Candy-as-Welles appeared in an embarrassing array of commercials, talk shows, and other low-budget productions. It's unknown whether or not Welles ever saw Candy's impersonation.
Author Kim Newman has featured Orson Welles as a character in several stories from his Anno Dracula series.
Although the character Brain from the animated series ''
Animaniacs'' and ''
Pinky and the Brain'' was not initially modeled after Welles, Maurice LaMarche was shown a picture of Brain and tasked with finding a voice for the character. LaMarche immediately thought of Welles and decided to do his Welles impersonation. LaMarche also played Welles in ''
The Critic'' (where his "later work", ads for such products as 'Mrs. Pell's Fishsticks', is referenced) and in the ''
Futurama'' episode "
Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences", in which he performs a ''War of the Worlds''-like play.
In Tim Burton's 1994 film ''Ed Wood'', the character Orson Welles (played by Vincent D'Onofrio and dubbed by Maurice LaMarche) makes a brief "cameo appearance", giving advice to director Edward D. Wood, Jr. who idolises Welles. Inspired, Wood proceeds to finish his film ''Plan 9 from Outer Space'', sometimes called one of the worst films of all time. Though ''Ed Wood'' is based on Wood's life, in reality the scene is entirely fictional: Wood never met Orson Welles. D'Onofrio would again portray Welles in the 2005 30-minute film ''Five Minutes Mr. Welles'' concerning Welles's role in the film ''The Third Man''.
In Peter Jackson's 1994 film ''Heavenly Creatures'', the character Pauline Parker (played by Melanie Lynskey) attempts to include a picture of Orson Welles in the pantheon of beauty Juliet Hulme (played by Kate Winslet) has crafted, but is rebuffed.
The 1996 film ''The Battle Over Citizen Kane'', which chronicles the battle between Welles and Hearst, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
A 1999 HBO docudrama, ''RKO 281'', tells the story of the making of ''Citizen Kane'', starring Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles.
Tim Robbins's 1999 film ''Cradle Will Rock'' chronicles the process and events surrounding Welles and John Houseman's production of the 1937 musical by Marc Blitzstein. In it, Welles is played by actor Angus MacFadyen.
Playwright and actor Austin Pendleton wrote the 2000 play ''Orson's Shadow'' about Welles and his collaboration with Laurence Olivier. It deals with the time that Welles directed Laurence Olivier in a production of Eugène Ionesco's play ''Rhinoceros''.
In Michael Chabon's 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay'', the three main characters meet Orson Welles and attend the premiere of ''Citizen Kane'', then stay up all night discussing the film's impression upon them afterwards.
The film ''
Fade to Black'' (2006) is a fictional thriller based on Welles's 1948 journey to Rome to star in the movie ''
Black Magic''.
The final segment of ''The Simpsons'' "Treehouse of Horror XVII" (2006) features a parody of Welles's 1938 ''War of the Worlds'' radio broadcast in which, having been fooled once, the people of Springfield refuse to believe that an actual alien invasion is taking place. Welles was again voiced by Maurice LaMarche in the episode.
''Me and Orson Welles'' (2009), based on Robert Kaplow's novel, stars Zac Efron as a teenager who convinces Welles (Christian McKay) to cast him in Welles's 1937 production of ''Julius Caesar''.
In March 2012, citizens of
Woodstock, Illinois, and Wellesnet, the Orson Welles web resource, began petitioning the
United States Postal Service to issue a stamp in 2015 to honor Orson Welles on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
References
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Rosenbaum, Jonathan: ''Discovering Orson Welles'', Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007
''Shakespeare Bulletin'', Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 2005: Special Welles issue.
Simon, William G., ed.: "Special Welles issue", in: ''Persistence of Vision: the Journal of the Film Faculty of the City University of New York''; Number 7, 1988
Simonson, Robert. "Orson's Shadow Talkback Series Continues May 4 with Welles's Daughter." May 3, 2005
Taylor, John Russell: ''Orson Welles: a Celebration'', Pavilion, 1986
Taylor, John Russell: ''Orson Welles'', Pavilion, 1998
Walsh, John Evangelist: ''Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst and Citizen Kane'', Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Walters, Ben: ''Welles'', London: Haus Publishing, 2004 ISBN 978-1-904341-80-2
Welles, Orson: ''Les Bravades'', Workman, 1996
Welles, Orson and Bogdanovich, Peter: ''This is Orson Welles'', Da Capo Press, 1998.
Welles, Orson: ''Mr. Arkadin'', London: HarperCollins, 2006
Welles, Orson: ''The Big Brass Ring'', Black Spring Press, 1991
Welles, Orson: ''The Cradle Will Rock'', Santa Teresa Press, 1994
Welles, Orson: "The Other Side of the Wind", in: ''Cahiers du cinéma''/ Festival International du Film de Locarno, 2005
White, Rob: ''The Third Man'', London: BFI, 2003
Wood, Bret: ''Orson Welles: a Bio-Bibliography'', Greenwood Blue, 1990
External links
''Orson Welles – The One Man Band'' (1995)
''Senses of Cinema'' Great Directors Critical Database: Orson Welles
Orson Welles bibliography
Mercury Theatre on the Air
The Unseen Welles
Guide to the Orson Welles Materials, Lilly Library, Indiana University
Finding Aid for the Orson Welles – Oja Kodar Papers 1910–1998 (bulk 1965–1985 ), Special Collections Library, University of Michigan
Finding Aid for the Richard Wilson – Orson Welles Papers 1930–2000 (bulk 1930–1991 ), Special Collections Library, University of Michigan
Orson Welles: A Man of a Certain Ego by Rodger Jacobs at Pop Matters
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