Welles, Orson (1915-1985)

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Considered by many to be the most influential and innovative filmmaker of the twentieth century, Orson Welles made movies that were ambitious, original, and epic. This alone would qualify him as a popular culture icon. But add to his genius his notorious life history, and Welles becomes a singular legend. Child prodigy at seven, Broadway's boy wonder at 22, radio's enfant terrible at 23, Holly-wood's hottest director at 25, husband of sex symbol Rita Hayworth, Hollywood failure at 30, and 40 more years of attempted comebacks, obesity, and maverick films, the life of Orson Welles uniquely embodied the modern era.

Born on May 6, 1915, George Orson Welles, the second son of a successful inventor and his pianist wife, spent his first six years in provincial Kenosha, Wisconsin, before moving to Chicago. Shortly thereafter, his parents separated and Orson's older brother, Richard, was sent to boarding school, leaving Orson alone with his mother Beatrice, who soon commanded one of the city's most popular artistic and literary salons. Surrounded by actors, artists, and musicians and taken to the theatre, symphony, and opera, the boy responded to this cultural deluge by becoming a child prodigy. He learned Shakespeare soliloquies at seven, studied classical piano, and by eight had begun to write plays. But when his mother died shortly after his ninth birthday, Welles' life drastically changed.

Welles spent two difficult years living with his alcoholic father, who in turn exposed his son to his working-class artist and journalist friends. It was a relief when the 11-year-old was sent to the Todd School for Boys, a rigorous college preparatory academy. There his precocious talents flourished. Welles wrote, directed, and starred in school theatricals and studied painting. During Welles' summer vacations, father and son often traveled together, once taking a steamship as far as Shanghai. But when Dick Welles died suddenly a few months before Orson's 16th birthday, the boy was both distraught and relieved to no longer have to take care of his alcoholic parent.

Six months after his father's death, the gifted 16-year-old graduated from Todd and left for Ireland, planning to study painting. But after drifting around the country for a few months, he arrived in Dublin, where he began to haunt the local theatres. On his first visit to the experimental Gate Theatre, Welles decided to audition, touting himself as one of America's top young actors. Not surprisingly, the young self-promoter was hired and spent the next year learning his craft in the company of some of Ireland's cutting-edge actors and directors.

When he returned to America in 1932, Welles hoped to take Broadway by storm. But New York was singularly unimpressed, and the 17-year-old sheepishly returned to Chicago. Over the course of the next year and a half, Welles wrote plays, traveled to North Africa, and directed small productions before being hired by theatrical legends Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic to join their Broadway company.

Welles made his Broadway debut at 18, playing Shakespeare and Shaw. A year later, he met the man who would orchestrate his stardom, 33-year-old director/producer John Houseman. Driven by the same high-flown theatrical goals, Houseman and Welles took part in the government-sponsored WPA (Work Projects Administration) Federal Theatre Project, where Welles directed an all-black, voodoo Macbeth to rave reviews. The two men soon formed their own repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, and, in 1937, they took Broadway by storm with their production of Julius Caesar set in fascist Italy. By age 22, Orson Welles was world famous as Broad-way's boy wonder.

The Mercury Theatre soon branched out into hour-long radio broadcasts, the most notorious of which was certainly Welles' 1938 Halloween broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, which terrified a nation into truly believing that New Jersey was being invaded by Martians. Hollywood soon came to call. Hoping to exploit the hype around the brilliant enfant terrible, RKO offered Welles $225,000 to produce, direct, write, and act in two films. With total creative freedom and a percentage of the profits built into the contract, it was an offer Welles could not refuse.

Welles came out to Hollywood with the idea of filming Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but difficulties arose and he decided to work with veteran screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Together they wrote a brilliant screenplay about an aging media tycoon dying in his Florida mansion. A thinly disguised biography of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane depicted Kane/Hearst as a tyrant who has alienated everyone who loved him. The film tells Kane's story from five different points of view. With 25-year-old Welles directing, producing, and starring in the title role, Citizen Kane broke new cinematic ground. As described in Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film, its innovations included, "1. composition in depth: the use of extreme deep focus cinematography to connect distant figures in space; 2. complex mise-en-scène, in which the frame overflowed with action and detail; 3. low angle shots that revealed ceilings and made characters, especially Kane, seem simultaneously dominant and trapped; 4. long takes; 5. a fluid, moving camera that expanded the action beyond the frame and increased the importance of off-screen space; and 6. the creative use of sound as a transition device … and to create visual metaphors." The film featured a superb cast, which included Joseph Cotten and George Coulouris from the Mercury Theatre as well as Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, and Everett Sloane.

Citizen Kane was lauded by the critics, but ran into trouble at the box office when Hearst refused to carry advertisements for the film in his newspapers and launched a smear campaign. Nominated for nine Academy Awards, Welles' masterpiece was snubbed by the Academy and only won one Oscar—Best Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles. Citizen Kane has nonetheless come to be regarded as the greatest film ever made, ranking number one on the American Film Institute list of the top 100 movies of all time.

Welles' next film was an adaptation of the Booth Tarkington novel, The Magnificent Ambersons. A somewhat more conventional film than Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons utilized many of the same experimental techniques to depict turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, but when Welles left the country, RKO edited more than 40 minutes out of the film. The film proved another commercial failure, losing more than half a million dollars, and Welles would never again be regarded as a bankable director.

Welles married World War II cinematic sex symbol, Rita Hayworth, but despite harnessing her star power to his marvelous 1948 film noir, The Lady from Shanghai, his directorial career was on the decline. When his experimental movie of Shakespeare's Macbeth failed at the box office a year later, the nails were all but in Welles' Hollywood coffin. He left Hollywood for a self-imposed 10-year exile, returning in 1958 to direct and act in the classic Touch of Evil with his frequent co-star Joseph Cotten.

Monica Sullivan has written, "Orson Welles' early years were so spectacular that movie cultists might have preferred that he'd lived fast, died young and left a good-looking corpse." Indeed, although Welles returned to direct a few cinematic gems, it can only be said that his film career was uneven. As he grew older, he also gained weight, becoming a very obese man. Although he appeared on wine commercials and the occasional talk show, Welles became a somewhat tragic figure even as his status as filmmaking legend grew. His final film, The Other Side of the Wind, a quasi-autobiographical tale of a famous filmmaker struggling to get his picture financed, remained unfinished. As noted in Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film, "As an unseen fragment, it was a sad an ironic end for a filmmaking maverick who set the standards for the modern narrative film and the man who was, in the words of Martin Scorcese, 'responsible for inspiring more people to be film directors than anyone else in the history of the cinema'." Troubled though the life of Orson Welles may have been—his potential as a director perhaps unfulfilled—his place in the pantheon of popular culture is assured.

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Sullivan, Monica. "Orson Welles." Movie Magazine International. http://www.shoestring.org/mmirevs/welle s-birthday.html. October 13, 1998.

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