Welles, Orson 1915-1985

WELLES, ORSON 1915-1985

Secret History

At the time of his death in 1985, Orson Welles was most widely recognized for a series of television commercials selling wine. His delivery of the line "We will sell no wine before its time" and his substantial girth made him fodder for comedians. In many ways it was a fitting end to a genius who had never really been fully appreciated for his work while he was producing it. Although he was given an honorary Academy Award in 1970 "for superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures," an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1975, and a British Film Institute fellowship in 1984, Welles's contribution remained relatively unknown to a wider public. Little was known about this prodigy of theater and stage.

Boy Genius

Born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he displayed a precocious talent, becoming an accomplished pianist and beginning his stage career at age five in Samson and Delilah in Chicago. His mother, a professional musician, died when he was nine, and Welles was sent to the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. There he met Roger "Skipper" Hill, who encouraged Welles to read Shakespeare and produce plays for the school. At sixteen Welles traveled alone to Ireland. He audaciously walked into the Gate Theatre and presented himself as a nineteen-year-old with membership in New York's Theater Guild. He was given a role in Jew Süss and was called an overnight sensation in the The New York Times. He returned to Todd School as a drama coach and wrote a play, never produced, called Marching Song, which bore a resemblance to his later opus Citizen Kane. In 1938 Hill and Welles wrote a book about Shakespeare (Everybody's Shakespeare) that became a standard reference text. Through a meeting with Thornton Wilder, Welles wound up with Katharine Cornell's theater company. He began distinguishing himself as an actor. He was nineteen years old in 1934, when he made his New York stage debut as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet.

Mercurial

In 1935 Welles was approached by John Houseman, who was working in the new Federal Theater Project. Welles joined the project, and the two promptly made a splash with an all-black production of Macbeth at the Harlem Theater. The "voodoo" production was a hit, and the company, now called Project 891, moved to the Maxine Elliot Theater. Joseph Gotten and Arlene Francis were among the players. Welles began broadcasting on radio and became a star. Project 891 lost its federal funding with a now-famous prounion production of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. They were locked out of the theater on opening night and promptly walked with the audience to a nearby theater, where the play was performed in the audience so as not to break union rules. Welles now starred in The Shadow on radio and formed the Mercury Theater in 1937. His modern-dress, anti-Fascist version of Julius Caesar caused a sensation and confirmed Welles's status as an actor. He made the cover of Time magazine in 1938. The Mercury Theater went on the air, and on 30 October 1938 produced the legendary radio broadcast The War of the Worlds. Many believed the docudrama broadcast of a Martian invasion to be real, and an overnight panic gripped the country. In the morning Welles apologized before newsreel cameras. He was twenty-three and nationally notorious.

Citizen Kane

Offered a film contract by RKO Radio in 1939, Welles made a ridiculous list of demands and was promptly granted all of them. He had total control over his filmmaking, an unheard-of situation at the time. After starting and abandoning a film version of Heart of Darkness, Welles made Citizen Kane from a screenplay he had written with Herman Mankiewicz and Houseman. The film was seen as an attack on William Randolph Hearst, who promptly banned all mention of Welles and Citizen Kane from his newspapers. Citizen Kane, with its unusual, multiple points of view, its monumental visuals, and its camera technique, is continually voted as the greatest film ever made. It won an Oscar for best screenplay despite limited release and won the New York Film Critics' Circle Award as best film of 1941. Welles was twenty-five years old.

Trouble

In a sense the rest was downhill for Welles. His success caused resentment. His costly vision caused the studios to assert more control over his films. RKO Radio released his next project, The Magnificent Ambersons, while Welles was in Brazil. It failed miserably, in part because the studio editors had butchered it. For the next two decades Welles made a handful of films through sheer will, often with little studio support. He was the first independent filmmaker and often had trouble finishing projects for lack of finances. He filmed Othello and won the 1952 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize. He had already filmed Macbeth, another of his famous productions. Meanwhile he continued acting in the films of others, creating many memorable roles such as Harry Lime in The Third Man and Rochester in Jane Eyre.

Drifter

Through the 1950s and 1960s Welles wandered. He wrote two novels, Une Grosse Legume (1953) and Mr. Arkadin, (1956) the latter of which he also filmed. He lived in England and performed in London's West End, triumphing as Othello and as Ahab in his own magnificently staged Moby Dick. He filmed King Lear for television, but still Hollywood would hardly approach him. In a 1955 production of King Lear in New York, Welles broke both ankles on opening night and finished the production in a wheelchair. Other film roles such as Cardinal Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons kept his fame alive, but his greatest work was behind him. He is often seen as a megalomaniac who had trouble finishing his work. More likely he was too independent for Hollywood's rigid studio system, and much of his greatest work was undercut by those who lacked his vision. Citizen Kane was enough, however, to mark Orson Welles's place in film history.

Source:

James Howard, The Complete Films of Orson Welles (New York: Citadel, 1991).