Orson Welles
| Orson Welles | ||
 Orson Welles in 1937 | ||
| Background information | ||
| Born as: | George Orson Welles | |
| Born | May 06, 1915 Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S. (map) | |
| Died | Oct 10, 1985 Los Angeles, California, U.S. | |
| Alma Mater: | School of the Art Institute of Chicago | |
| Partner(s): | ||
| Spouse(s): | ||
| Children: | 3, including Beatrice Welles | |
| Occupation: | Actor, director, producer, screenwriter | |
| Years active | 1931–1985 | |
George Orson Welles (✦May 6, 1915 – †October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
While in his 20s, Welles directed high-profile stage productions for the Federal Theatre Project, including an adaptation of Macbeth with an entirely African American cast and the political musical The Cradle Will Rock. In 1937, he and John Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre, an independent repertory theatre company that presented a series of productions on Broadway through 1941, including Caesar (1937), an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
In 1938, his radio anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air gave Welles the platform to find international fame as the director and narrator of a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, which caused some listeners to believe that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was in fact occurring. Although reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed 23-year-old Welles to notoriety.
His first film was Citizen Kane (1941), which is consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made and which he co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in as the title character, Charles Foster Kane. Welles released twelve other features, the most acclaimed of which include The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Touch of Evil (1958), The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (1966) and F for Fake (1973). His distinctive
Welles was an outsider to the studio system and struggled for creative control on his projects early on with the major film studios in Hollywood and later in life with a variety of independent financiers across Europe, where he spent most of his career. Many of his films were either heavily edited or remained unreleased. Some, like Touch of Evil, have been painstakingly re-edited from his notes. With a development spanning almost 50 years, Welles's final film, The Other Side of the Wind, was posthumously released in 2018.
Welles had three marriages, including one with Rita Hayworth, and three children. Known for his baritone voice, Welles performed extensively across theatre, radio, and film. He was a lifelong magician, noted for presenting troop variety shows in the war years. He was a lifelong member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society of American Magicians. In 2002, he was voted the greatest film director of all time in two British Film Institute polls among directors and critics. In 2018, he was included in the list of the 50 greatest Hollywood actors of all time by The Daily Telegraph.
Early life
George Orson Welles was born May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a son of Richard Head Welles (1872–1930) and Beatrice Ives Welles (née Beatrice Lucy Ives; 1883–1924). He was named after one of his great-grandfathers, influential Kenosha attorney Orson S. Head, and his brother George Head. An alternative story of the source of his first and middle names was told by George Ade, who met Welles's parents on a West Indies cruise toward the end of 1914. Ade was traveling with a friend, Orson Wells (no relation), and the two of them sat at the same table as Mr. and Mrs. Richard Welles. Mrs. Welles was pregnant at the time, and when they said goodbye, she told them that she had enjoyed their company so much that if the child were a boy, she intended to name him after them: George Orson.
Despite his family's affluence, Welles encountered hardship in childhood. His parents separated and moved approximately 55 miles south to Chicago in 1919. His father, who made a fortune as the inventor of a popular bicycle lamp, became an alcoholic and stopped working. Welles's mother, a pianist, played during lectures by Dudley Crafts Watson at the Art Institute of Chicago to support her son and herself; the oldest Welles boy, "Dickie", was institutionalized at an early age because he had learning difficulties. Beatrice died of hepatitis in a Chicago hospital on May 10, 1924, just after Welles's ninth birthday. The Gordon String Quartet, a predecessor to the Berkshire String Quartet, which had made its first appearance at her home in 1921, played at Beatrice's funeral.
After his mother's death, Welles ceased pursuing music. It was decided that he would spend the summer with the Watson family at a private art colony in the village of Wyoming in the Finger Lakes Region of New York, established by Lydia Avery Coonley Ward. There, he played and became friends with the children of the Aga Khan, including the 12-year-old Prince Aly Khan (years later, they successively married Rita Hayworth). Then, in what Welles later described as "a hectic period" in his life, he lived in a Chicago apartment with both his father and Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician who had been a close friend of both his parents. Welles briefly attended public school before his alcoholic father left business altogether and took him along on his travels to Jamaica and the Far East. When they returned, they settled in a hotel in Grand Detour, Illinois, that was owned by his father. When the hotel burned down, Welles and his father took to the road again.
"During the three years that Orson lived with his father, some observers wondered who took care of whom," wrote biographer Frank Brady.
"In some ways, he was never really a young boy, you know," said Roger Hill, who became Welles's teacher and lifelong friend.
Welles briefly attended public school in Madison, Wisconsin, enrolled in the fourth grade. On September 15, 1926, he entered the Todd Seminary for Boys, an expensive independent school in Woodstock, Illinois, that his older brother, Richard Ives Welles, had attended ten years before until he was expelled for misbehavior. At Todd School, Welles came under the influence of Roger Hill, a teacher who was later 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 theatrical experiments and productions there.
"Todd provided Welles with many valuable experiences," wrote critic Richard France. "He was able to explore and experiment in an atmosphere of acceptance and encouragement. In addition to a theatre, the school's own radio station was at his disposal." Welles's first radio experience was on the Todd station, where he performed an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes that was written by him.
On December 28, 1930, when Welles was 15, his father died of heart and kidney failure at the age of 58, alone in a hotel in Chicago. Shortly before this, Welles had announced to his father that he would stop seeing him, believing it would prompt his father to refrain from drinking. As a result, Orson felt guilty because he believed his father had drunk himself to death because of him. His father's will left it to Orson to name his guardian. When Roger Hill declined, Welles chose Maurice Bernstein.
Following graduation from Todd in May 1931, Welles was awarded a scholarship to Harvard College, while his mentor Roger Hill advocated he attend Cornell College in Iowa. Rather than enrolling, he chose to travel. He studied for a few weeks at the Art Institute of Chicago with Boris Anisfeld, who encouraged him to pursue painting.
Welles occasionally returned to Woodstock, the place he eventually named when he was asked in a 1960 interview, "Where is home?" Welles replied, "I suppose it's Woodstock, Illinois, if it's anywhere. I went to school there for four years. If I try to think of a home, it's that."
Personal life
Relationships and family
Orson Welles and Chicago-born actress and socialite Virginia Nicolson (1916–1996) were married on November 14, 1934. The couple separated in December 1939 and were divorced on February 1, 1940. After bearing with Welles's romances in New York, Virginia had learned that Welles had fallen in love with Mexican actress Dolores del Río.
Infatuated with her since adolescence, Welles met del Río at Darryl Zanuck's ranch soon after he moved to Hollywood in 1939. Their relationship was kept secret until 1941, when del Río filed for divorce from her second husband. They openly appeared together in New York while Welles was directing the Mercury stage production Native Son. They acted together in the movie Journey into Fear (1943). Their relationship came to an end due, among other things, to Welles's infidelities. Del Río returned to Mexico in 1943, shortly before Welles married Rita Hayworth.
Welles married Rita Hayworth on September 7, 1943. They were divorced on November 10, 1947. During his last interview, recorded for The Merv Griffin Show on the evening before his death, Welles called Hayworth "one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived ... and we were a long time together—I was lucky enough to have been with her longer than any of the other men in her life."
In 1955, Welles married actress Paola Mori (née Countess Paola di Gerfalco), an Italian aristocrat who starred as Raina Arkadin in his 1955 film, Mr. Arkadin. The couple began a passionate affair, and they were married at her parents' insistence. They were wed in London May 8, 1955, and never divorced.
Croatian-born artist and actress Oja Kodar became Welles's longtime companion both personally and professionally from 1966 onward, and they lived together for some of the last 20 years of his life.
Welles had three daughters from his marriages: Christopher Welles Feder (born 1938, with Virginia Nicolson);Rebecca Welles Manning (1944–2004), with Rita Hayworth; and Beatrice Welles (born 1955, with Paola Mori).
Welles is thought to have had a son, British director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (born 1940), with Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, then the wife of Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, 4th baronet. When Lindsay-Hogg was 16, his mother reluctantly divulged pervasive rumors that his father was Welles, and she denied them—but in such detail that he doubted her veracity. Fitzgerald evaded the subject for the rest of her life. Lindsay-Hogg knew Welles, worked with him in the theatre and met him at intervals throughout Welles's life. After learning that Welles's oldest daughter, Chris, his childhood playmate, had long suspected that he was her brother, Lindsay-Hogg initiated a DNA test that proved inconclusive. In his 2011 autobiography, Lindsay-Hogg reported that his questions were resolved by his mother's close friend Gloria Vanderbilt, who wrote that Fitzgerald had told her that Welles was his father. A 2015 Welles biography by Patrick McGilligan, however, reports the impossibility of Welles's paternity: Fitzgerald left the U.S. for Ireland in May 1939, and her son was conceived before her return in late October, whereas Welles did not travel overseas during that period.
After the death of Rebecca Welles Manning, a man named Marc McKerrow was revealed to be her son—and therefore a direct descendant of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth—after he requested his adoption records unsealed. While McKerrow and Rebecca were never able to meet due to her cancer, they were in touch before her death, and he attended her funeral. McKerrow's reactions to the revelation and his meeting with Oja Kodar are documented in the 2008 film Prodigal Sons by his sister Kim Reed. McKerrow died on June 18, 2010, suddenly in his sleep at the age of 44. His death was "...caused by complications from a nocturnal seizure" related to a car accident and resulting injury when he was younger.
In the 1940s, Welles had a brief relationship with Maila Nurmi, who, according to the bio "Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira", Maila Nurmi, became pregnant; since Welles was at the time married to Hayworth, Nurmi gave the child up for adoption. However, the child mentioned in the book was born in 1944. Nurmi revealed in an interview weeks before her death in January 2008 how she met Welles in a New York casting office in the spring of 1946.
Despite an urban legend promoted by Welles, he is not related to Abraham Lincoln's wartime Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles. The myth dates back to the first newspaper feature ever written about Welles—"Cartoonist, Actor, Poet and only 10"—in the February 19, 1926, issue of The Capital Times. The article falsely states that he was descended from "Gideon Welles, who was a member of President Lincoln's cabinet". As presented by Charles Higham in a genealogical chart that introduces his 1985 biography of Welles, Orson Welles's father was Richard Head Welles (born Wells), son of Richard Jones Wells, son of Henry Hill Wells (who had an uncle named Gideon Wells), son of William Hill Wells, son of Richard Wells (1734–1801).
Physical characteristics
Peter Noble's 1956 biography describes Welles as "a magnificent figure of a man, over six feet tall, handsome, with flashing eyes and a gloriously resonant speaking-voice". Welles said that a voice specialist once told him he was born to be a heldentenor, a heroic tenor, but that when he was young and working at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, he forced his voice down into a bass-baritone.
Even as a baby, Welles was prone to illness, including diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, and malaria. From infancy he suffered from asthma, sinus headaches, and backache that was later found to be caused by congenital anomalies of the spine. Foot and ankle trouble throughout his life was the result of flat feet. "As he grew older", Brady wrote, "his ill health was exacerbated by the late hours he was allowed to keep [and] an early penchant for alcohol and tobacco".
In 1928, at age 13, Welles was already more than six feet tall (1.83 meters) and weighed over 180 pounds (81.6 kg).[13]: 50 His passport recorded his height as six feet three inches (192 cm), with brown hair and green eyes.[
"Crash diets, [pharmaceutical] drugs, and corsets had slimmed him for his early film roles", wrote biographer Barton Whaley. "Then always back to gargantuan consumption of high-caloric food and booze. By summer 1949, when he was 34, his weight had crept up to a stout 230 pounds (104 kg). In 1953, he ballooned from 250 to 275 pounds (113 to 125 kg). After 1960, he remained permanently obese."
Religious beliefs
When Peter Bogdanovich once asked him about his religion, Welles gruffly replied that it was none of his business, then misinformed him that he was raised Catholic.
Although the Welles family was no longer devout, it was fourth-generation Episcopalian and before that, Quaker and Puritan.
The funeral of Welles's father, Richard H. Welles, was Episcopalian.
In April 1982, when interviewer Merv Griffin asked him 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." Near the end of his life, Welles was dining at Ma Maison, his favorite restaurant in Los Angeles, when proprietor Patrick Terrail conveyed an invitation from the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, who asked Welles to be his guest of honor at divine liturgy at Saint Sophia Cathedral. Welles replied, "Please tell him I really appreciate that offer, but I am an atheist."
"Orson never joked or teased about the religious beliefs of others", wrote biographer Barton Whaley. "He accepted it as a cultural artifact, suitable for the births, deaths, and marriages of strangers and even some friends—but without emotional or intellectual meaning for himself."
Politics and activism
Welles was politically active from the beginning of his career. He remained aligned with left-wing politics and the American Left throughout his life, and always defined his political orientation as "progressive". A Democrat, he was an outspoken critic of racism in the United States and the practice of segregation. He was a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and often spoke out on the radio in support of progressive politics. He campaigned heavily for Roosevelt in the 1944 election. Welles did not support the 1948 presidential bid of Roosevelt's second vice president Henry A. Wallace for the Progressive Party, later describing Wallace as "a prisoner of the Communist Party."
In a 1983 conversation with his friend Roger Hill, Welles recalled: "During a White House dinner, when I was campaigning for Roosevelt, in a toast, with considerable tongue in cheek, he said, 'Orson, you and I are the two greatest actors alive today.' In private that evening, and on several other occasions, he urged me to run for a Senate seat in either California or Wisconsin. He wasn't alone." In the 1980s, Welles still expressed admiration for Roosevelt but also described his presidency as "a semidictatorship."
During a 1970 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, Welles claimed to have met Hitler while hiking in Austria with a teacher who was a "budding Nazi". He said that Hitler made no impression on him at all and does not remember him. He said that he had no personality at all: "He was invisible. There was nothing there until there were 5,000 people yelling sieg heil."
In 1946, Welles took to the airwaves in a series of radio broadcasts demanding justice for a decorated Black veteran Isaac Woodard, who had been beaten and blinded by white police officers. Welles devoted his July 28, 1946 program to reading Woodard’s affidavit and vowing to bring the officer responsible to justice. He continued his crusade over four subsequent Sunday afternoon broadcasts on ABC Radio. “The NAACP felt that these broadcasts did more than anything else to prompt the Justice Department to act on the case,” the Museum of Broadcasting stated in its 1988 retrospect Orson Welles on the Air: The Radio Years.
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.
Welles's political activities were reported on pages 155–157 of Red Channels, the anti-Communist publication that, in part, fueled the already flourishing Hollywood Blacklist. He was in Europe during the height of the Red Scare, thereby adding one more reason for the Hollywood establishment to ostracize him.
In 1970, Welles narrated (but did not write) a satirical political record on the rise of President Richard Nixon titled "The Begatting of the President".
Welles spoke before a crowd of 700,000 at a nuclear disarmament rally in Central Park on June 12, 1982 and attacked the policies of President Ronald Reagan and the Republican party.
"American: An Odyssey to 1947", a documentary by Danny Wu that looks at Welles’ life against the political landscape of the 1930s and ’40s, had its premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival in October 2022.
Death and tributes
On the evening of October 9, 1985, Welles recorded his final interview on the syndicated TV program The Merv Griffin Show, appearing with biographer Barbara Leaming. "Both Welles and Leaming talked of Welles's life, and the segment was a nostalgic interlude," wrote biographer Frank Brady. Welles returned to his house in Hollywood and worked into the early hours typing stage directions for the project he and Gary Graver were planning to shoot at UCLA the following day. Welles died sometime on the morning of October 10, following a heart attack. He was found by his chauffeur at around 10 a.m.; the first of Welles's friends to arrive was Paul Stewart. Welles was 70 years old at his death.
Welles was cremated by prior agreement with the executor of his estate, Greg Garrison, whose advice about making lucrative TV appearances in the 1970s made it possible for Welles to pay off a portion of the taxes he owed the IRS. A brief private funeral was attended by Paola Mori and Welles's three daughters—the first time they had ever been together. Only a few close friends were invited: Garrison, Graver, Roger Hill, and Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cuto. Chris Welles Feder later described the funeral as an awful experience.
A public memorial tribute took place November 2, 1985, at the Directors Guild of America Theater in Los Angeles. Host Peter Bogdanovich introduced speakers including Charles Champlin, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Greg Garrison, Charlton Heston, Roger Hill, Henry Jaglom, Arthur Knight, Oja Kodar, Barbara Leaming, Janet Leigh, Norman Lloyd, Dan O'Herlihy, Patrick Terrail and Robert Wise.
"I know what his feelings were regarding his death", Joseph Cotten later wrote. "He did not want a funeral; he wanted to be buried quietly in a little place in Spain. He wanted no memorial services ..." Cotten declined to attend the memorial program; instead, he sent a short message, ending with the last two lines of a Shakespeare sonnet that Welles had sent him on his most recent birthday:
- But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
- All losses are restored and sorrows end.
In 1987 the ashes of Welles were taken to Ronda, Spain, and buried in an old well covered by flowers on the rural estate of a longtime friend, bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez.
Career
- Wikipedia article: Orson Welles Career
Filmography
- Wikipedia article: Orson Welles Filmography
External links
- Wikipedia article: Orson Welles
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Note: Orson Welles was a volunteer at the Hollywood Canteen |