Orson Welles

 

 

Born in Kenosha, United States, 1915, American film director, producer, screenwriter and actor. Son of a businessman and a pianist, Welles was a child prodigy who began his theatrical career at the Gate Theatre in Dublin at the age of sixteen and five years later (1936) made his debut as an actor and director in New York. During his theatrical career he achieved notoriety thanks to various Shakespearean productions, such as Macbeth, a work performed entirely by black actors, or Julius Caesar, all of them produced by the Mercury Theatre, a company founded by Welles himself and his partner John Houseman in 1937.

His radio version of H. G. Wells' literary original The War of the Worlds (1938) was so realistic that it caused panic among thousands of listeners, convinced that an alien invasion was really taking place. Backed by this success, he signed a contract with the RKO production company that gave him complete creative freedom, a circumstance that he took full advantage of in his first film, Citizen Kane (1941).

Considered one of the most significant works in the history of cinema, this kind of imaginary biography of the press magnate William Randolph Hearst, starring Welles himself - also co-author of the script, which he wrote in collaboration with Herman J. Mankiewicz - was instrumental in laying the foundations of modern cinematic narrative language.

 

However, Hearst himself took advantage of the resources of his power to harshly criticize the film, which did not achieve the expected success in the United States, while it was not released in Europe until after the Second World War, where it immediately became a minority cult film.

 

His second film, The Fourth Commandment (1942), the only one he directed in which he did not appear as an actor, suffered considerable cuts from the production company, including a happy ending, before its release. The financial failure of these two films led RKO to cancel the contract; from then on, Welles would be forced to work under serious budgetary difficulties, which did not prevent him from filming another title considered key, The Lady from Shanghai (1947), a thriller starring Rita Hayworth, then his wife.

After filming the first of his versions of Shakespearean works, Macbeth (1945), he went into exile in Europe, tired of the pressures from the production companies and fearful of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the Old Continent he returned to Shakespeare with his version of Othello (1952), a film whose chaotic shooting lasted three years and which, despite having been awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, represented another commercial failure.

Thanks to the insistence of actor Charlton Heston, the film's lead and producer, Welles was able to return to Hollywood to direct Touch of Evil (1958), a majestic black-and-white thriller in which the film's opening sequence stands out, the longest in the history of cinema. Back in Europe, he shot The Trial (1962), a version of the novel of the same name by Franz Kafka, and in 1965, with production by the Spaniard Emiliano Piedra, Chimes at Midnight, an amalgam of various Shakespearean texts (mainly The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V) articulated around the figure of John Falstaff, a role that he reserved for himself and which constituted, at all levels, one of the high points of his career.

The last stage of his career as a director was marked by ambitious and ultimately unfinished projects, such as Don Quixote, The Deep or The Other Side of the Wind. In parallel to his activities as a director and star of his own films, he developed an important acting career in which stand out titles such as Rebel Soul (1944), by Robert Stevenson, the unforgettable The Third Man, by Carol Reed, or Moby Dick, by John Huston. In 1975, she received a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute.

 

Between 1936 and 1941, Orson Welles was involved in more than a hundred radio drama productions as writer, actor and director. From this and his films, he is considered one of the outstanding figures in American creative arts. He continued on radio through the early 1950s.

Radio was the golden key to his rise to fame. In September of 1937, Welles became the initially uncredited lead in the popular radio series, The Shadow. Writer Walter E. Gibson had created the character for the pulps; it grew into nationwide popularity due to it's fine adaptation to radio. From the first, Welles did the scripts with no rehearsal which, along with his wonderful voice and acting, gave the overtly melodramatic scripts an intelligence and urgency that was very different from other adventures on the radio dial.

While doing radio shows during the day, Welles and John Houseman worked nights producing a dramatic scene in New York City - The Mercury Theater. The work was excellently received but some shows were so was politically charged that attempted governmental control was rumored. It seemed that Welle's outsider genius status was already effecting his radio prestige.

In spite of that, Welles was offered a slot on network radio for his fine creative radio theatre in 1938. Each week they would do a full hour of quality drama, with Pabst Beer sponsoring the show. The Mercury Theater embraced thrillers such as Dracula and War of the Worlds, and the classics of literature such as Pickwick Papers and Tale of Two Cities. The notoriety of War of the Worlds got Campbell Soups interested, and so the new Campbell Playhouse continued where The Mercury Theater left off, with the same great actors and quality treatments of dramatic classic and original radio material, some written by Welles himself.

Orson continued to be a famous radio star post-Mercury Theater, and made many appearances on almost all the major radio shows of the time, as well as continuing his dramatic work on such shows as Norman Corwin's prestigious Columbia Theater Workshop and Suspense.

Later in Welles career after the creation of his great role in the film The Third Man, he was offered the Lime character in a radio series based on the movie. The Adventures of Harry Lime, it was called, but it continued to be known to the public as The Third Man. Produced in 1951 - 52, and then transcribed for America, of course it featured the atmospheric music of Anton Karas. Welles is able to make Harry Lime suave yet duplicitous while always working some scam or other for a hasty profit. Lovers of noir and the hard boiled school will admire the show's subtle European variations on the themes of crime and (escape from) punishment.

During that same period, Orson found time to do another UK production, The Black Museum. This was Scotland Yard's "mausoleum of murder," a "repository of crime." As narrator, Welles walked through the echoing museum, picking an common object and relating its criminal past.

The legendary Orson Welles was a phenomenon in the radio and cinema worlds, but his individual genius and auteurism were inherently counter-establishment. While remaining a famous personality, he lived to see his creative clout slowly diminish, until he was known for doing American TV commercials.

Welles had a torrid romance between 1938 and 1942 with the Mexican actress Dolores del Río. According to his daughter, Rebecca Welles, Dolores was the love of his life. Welles was married to the actress Rita Hayworth.

His love for Spain was well known, so he filmed several of his movies in Spain, especially in Ávila. In an interview he confessed that he would like to retire there. He also cultivated the friendship of well-known figures from the world of bullfighting at the time, such as Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín.

Throughout his life he had a high work rate and many financial disputes, which would eventually lead to his death. Welles died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1985. His ashes were buried in the Malaga municipality of Ronda, on the San Cayetano recreational estate, owned by his friend, the bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez, as he had expressed. However, there are other versions in which it is said that Orson Welles did not leave any will expressing his wishes after his death, so both his daughter and his wife agreed that his ashes would be scattered in Spain, since they agreed that that was the place where Welles felt happiest during the course of his life.