Orson Welles

The Full Biography

Orson Welles. Director. Actor. The Kenosha prodigy who made Citizen Kane at twenty-five and then spent a lifetime finishing pictures the town would not let him keep.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a dying man’s whisper — “Rosebud” — and a sled in a furnace, or a young Kane at a podium, the camera somewhere no studio camera had been taught to stand. The year was 1941. The picture was his first. What the still cannot show is George Orson Welles of Kenosha, Wisconsin, a boy whose mother died when he was nine, a Todd School theatrical, a radio panic on the night before Halloween, and a man whose unfinished films and hired voice are as much the life as the debut the syllabus never dropped.

He was born on May 6, 1915, the younger son of Richard Head Welles, who had made a fortune on a bicycle lamp and then drank it, and Beatrice Ives Welles, a concert pianist who had studied with Leopold Godowsky. The parents separated. Chicago took them. Beatrice died of hepatitis on May 10, 1924, just after his ninth birthday. The first pressure was a house without a mother and a father who could not stop. He was sent to the Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, in 1926. Roger Hill, the teacher who became headmaster and friend, let him treat Shakespeare and a school radio station as a laboratory. His father died in a Chicago hotel on December 28, 1930. Welles was fifteen. He had told the man he would not see him until the drinking stopped. He named Dr. Maurice Bernstein, the family friend, as guardian. He did not go to Harvard. He went to Ireland.

The door was Dublin, 1931. He walked into the Gate Theatre, claimed a Broadway pedigree he did not have, and was hired anyway. Hilton Edwards kept him. He was sixteen. Back in America he toured with Katharine Cornell, married Virginia Nicolson in 1934, and made a living in radio so large he forgot how to sleep. John Houseman found him. The Federal Theatre Project, 1936, gave him an all-Black Macbeth in Harlem — the so-called Voodoo Macbeth — and a national tour. The Cradle Will Rock, 1937, was locked out by the government the night before opening; Welles and Houseman walked the company twenty blocks and played it from the house with Marc Blitzstein at a piano. That same year they founded the Mercury Theatre. Modern-dress Julius Caesar as an anti-fascist machine set Broadway on its ear. He was twenty-two. Time put him on the cover.

On October 30, 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds as a sequence of news bulletins. Some listeners, arriving late, believed Martians had come. The size of the panic has been argued ever since. The size of the fame has not. RKO offered a contract that gave a first-time filmmaker final cut. Hollywood mocked the paper. He used it.

Citizen Kane opened in 1941. He was twenty-five. He produced, directed, co-wrote, and played Charles Foster Kane. Herman J. Mankiewicz shared the script. Gregg Toland shot the deep focus that made a room look like a fact. William Randolph Hearst, recognizing a portrait, tried to kill the picture in the press and in the theaters. The Academy nominated it for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, which it lost to How Green Was My Valley. Welles and Mankiewicz kept the screenplay award. The civic object is not the statue. It is the film the industry could not bury.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is the wound that never closed. Welles shot a family decline and went to South America on a wartime project. RKO cut the picture, shot a happier ending, and destroyed footage. He never got the cut back. The Lady from Shanghai (1947), with Rita Hayworth, whom he had married in 1943, is a hall of mirrors the studio also shortened. Macbeth (1948) was cheap and fast. In Europe he made Othello (1951) in pieces, between acting jobs that paid for the next reel. Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) made Harry Lime the most famous face he did not direct. Touch of Evil (1958) is a border-town noir whose opening shot is still a classroom. Universal recut it; a longer version, closer to his memo, arrived decades after. Chimes at Midnight (1965) is Falstaff, the part he loved, the picture he named as his own.

I started at the top and worked my way down.Orson Welles

That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a joke he told on himself. The turn is not decline as entertainment. The turn is a man who had final cut at twenty-four and spent the rest of his working life raising money, acting in other people’s pictures, and shooting when the check cleared. He did not stop directing. The town stopped delivering the negative uncut.

The pictures between Kane and Falstaff are a working life the syllabus compresses into a wound. Journey into Fear (1943) left the studio in other hands. The Stranger (1946) is a Nazi-hunter thriller he finished on time and on budget, proof he could deliver a studio picture if the town would let him. The Lady from Shanghai (1947), with Rita Hayworth, is a hall of mirrors Columbia shortened. Macbeth (1948) was cheap and fast for Republic. In Europe he made Othello in pieces, between acting jobs that paid for the next reel; it took the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1952. Mr. Arkadin (1955) is another film that exists in more than one cut. Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) made Harry Lime the most famous face he did not direct. Touch of Evil (1958) is a border-town noir whose opening shot is still a classroom; Universal recut it. The Trial (1962), from Kafka, is a labyrinth he owned. Chimes at Midnight (1965) is Falstaff, the part he loved, the picture he named as his own. The Immortal Story (1968), for French television, is a short late jewel.

He acted to eat and to shoot. He played Father Mapple in John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956). He played a war criminal for Carol Reed, a cardinal, a tycoon, a voice. The hired face paid for the next day on Othello and then for the next day on whatever reel was open. He narrated. He dubbed. He sold the instrument itself. The Mercury years — Harlem Macbeth, The Cradle Will Rock, modern-dress Caesar, the radio panic of October 30, 1938 — remain the first shop. Hollywood was the second. Europe was the third. Hotel rooms and cutting rooms were the last. He never became only a voice. He became a man who used the voice so the picture might exist.

Paola Mori, married in 1955, was the last legal wife; Beatrice, their daughter, still guards the estate. Oja Kodar, from 1966, was partner and collaborator — the other working life, the one that kept cameras turning when Hollywood would not book the stage. They shot in Spain, in France, in Arizona, in whatever house would hold a crew for a week. The Deep was begun and not finished. Don Quixote was begun and not finished. The Other Side of the Wind was begun in 1970 and shot off and on through 1976, John Huston in the lead, a director hunting money to complete a last picture — a plot that was also a diary. The unfinished pile is not a punch line. It is the working method of a man the town would not capitalize.

Virginia Nicolson was the first wife; Christopher, their daughter, the first child. Rita Hayworth was the second marriage, 1943 to 1947; Rebecca the daughter of that house. In 1955 he married the Italian actress Paola Mori. Their daughter, Beatrice, still guards the estate. From 1966 Oja Kodar was partner and collaborator — the other working life, the one that kept cameras turning when Hollywood would not book the stage. Friends from Mercury describe loyalty and a pace that burned people. The marriages did not hold the pace. The pictures, finished and not, did.

The later years

The last decades are not a punch line. They are unfinished films and a voice. He shot The Other Side of the Wind for years, John Huston in the lead, a director hunting money to complete a last picture — a plot that was also a diary. F for Fake (1973) is an essay on fraud that is also a method: Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, a director who knew what a hoax looks like from the inside. Filming Othello (1978) is a man talking to his own old picture. He narrated, dubbed, and sold the instrument itself: Paul Masson wine spots whose line about selling no wine before its time became a national catchphrase; a rumble that could open Shogun or, for a stretch, name Robin Masters on Magnum, P.I. The voice paid for the next day of shooting. He kept a table at Ma Maison in Los Angeles and held court as if a restaurant booth were a cutting room. He kept editing in houses and hotel rooms. The work did not become a lounge act. It became a portable studio.

The Academy gave him an honorary Oscar in 1970, “for superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures.” John Huston accepted; Welles was not in the room. The AFI Life Achievement Award came in 1975, and that night he was present, large, funny, and still asking for money to finish a picture. He appeared on The Merv Griffin Show the evening before he died and talked as if the next morning were another shooting day. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on October 10, 1985, in a house on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood. He was seventy. He had been working on The Magic Show and on notes for pictures that would not be finished in his lifetime. Paola was still the wife on paper. Kodar was still the collaborator. Beatrice was already the keeper.

What those last years were is easy to file as decline: the wine ads, the weight, the unfinished reels. They were a method. He raised money by being Orson Welles so that Orson Welles could direct for one more week. He never got Ambersons back. He never saw The Other Side of the Wind assembled. He named Chimes at Midnight as the picture that was his. Kenosha is the first room. Todd School is the first studio. Hollywood is the wound. Europe is the shop that would still book him. Stanley Avenue is the last address. He had started at the top. He was still climbing down, camera in hand, when the heart stopped.

After he was gone

Beatrice remains. Kodar remains in the credits of the work they shared. Kane is still the first film a serious class is handed. Ambersons is still the argument about what a studio owes a director. Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight are the syllabus the commercials never canceled. In 2018 Netflix and a team of scholars and technicians released The Other Side of the Wind. The man who started at the top had, at last, another ending — not a happy one, necessarily, but a finished one.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.Orson Welles

He came out of Kenosha and a Todd School stage, panicked a radio nation, made the American picture the century could not ignore, lost Ambersons to a cutting room, played Harry Lime, directed Falstaff, hired out the voice so the next reel could exist, and left a last film for other hands to complete. The still of Kane will last. It should. The life behind it was a locked theater, a sled, a missing negative, and a man who kept shooting.

If you only remember Rosebud, you have the riddle. If you remember Todd, the Mercury, the scissors on Ambersons, and the voice that paid for the unfinished work, you have him.

Portrait: Carl Van Vechten · Public domain (no known copyright restrictions, Library of Congress) · via Wikimedia Commons

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