Orson Welles

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor and filmmaker whose work moved across theatre, radio, and film with unusual force. He came of age in the 1930s, first drawing notice in New York City with the Federal Theatre Project. At 21, he directed a celebrated 1936 adaptation of Macbeth with an African-American cast, followed in 1937 by the political musical The Cradle Will Rock. With John Houseman, he then founded the Mercury Theatre, an independent repertory company whose Broadway productions included a modern, politically charged Caesar and the premiere of Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Welles became internationally famous in 1938 through The Mercury Theatre on the Air. As director and narrator of a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, he helped create a broadcast that led some listeners to believe a Martian invasion was taking place. The episode made the 23-year-old a figure of public notoriety and brought offers from Hollywood studios. Those offers culminated in what has been described as the greatest contract ever offered to a filmmaker.

His first film, Citizen Kane (1941), made him one of cinema’s central figures. Welles co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the film as Charles Foster Kane, and it has been consistently ranked among the greatest films ever made. He went on to direct 12 other features, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Othello (1951), Touch of Evil (1958), The Trial (1962), and Chimes at Midnight (1966). His style included layered and nonlinear narrative forms, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes.

The sources of Welles’s way of thinking were early and personal. Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he was the younger son of Richard Head Welles and Beatrice Ives Welles. His mother, a concert pianist, arranged piano and violin lessons for him and supported the family through music after his parents separated and moved to Chicago. She died of hepatitis just after his ninth birthday. His father, once successful as the inventor of a bicycle lamp, became alcoholic, stopped working, and later died when Welles was 15. Welles later spoke of guilt over their final separation. At the Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, teacher Roger Hill gave him room to experiment, stage productions, and use the school’s radio station, where Welles performed his own adaptation of Sherlock Holmes.

Welles’s career was marked by both acclaim and conflict. He struggled for creative control in the studio system and later worked as an independent filmmaker, often unable to secure financing. He also acted for other directors, playing Rochester in Jane Eyre, Harry Lime in The Third Man, and Cardinal Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons. Praised as “the ultimate auteur,” he received an Academy Award, three Grammy Awards, the Golden Lion, the Palme d’Or, an Academy Honorary Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award, and a British Film Institute Fellowship. His words still carry force because they came from a mind trained in performance, sound, image, and risk, and from a life spent testing what an audience could be made to see, hear, and believe.