Orson Welles
Talent, girth, ego, ambition.
Everything about Orson Welles swelled beyond the boundaries of normal men.
His talent as an actor, writer, director, and producer soared above the worlds of stage, radio, film, and television.
But as high as his skill took him, his outsized personality and uncompromising artistic stance weighted down his actual accomplishments.
And while the first film bearing his complete authorial stamp, Citizen Kane, in 1941, ensures that Welles will always have a place at the forefront of film history,
the rest of his wildly uneven career sags under the yoke of his enormous, if unfulfilled, potential.
Ironically, this most sophisticated of artist started his life on the simple plains of the American Midwest.
George Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Welles' parents, however, had high hopes for their son.
After a local doctor determined that young Orson was a prodigy at the age of 18 months, his mother dedicated her life to helping him realize his potential.
At the age that most children are learning how to tie their shoelaces, Welles was painting, playing violin, performing magic tricks, and acting in local theater productions.
Orson was the second son of Richard Welles, an inventor, and Beatrice Ives, a concert pianist.
The name George was soon dropped. The family moved to Chicago when Welles was four.
Two years later his parents separated formally. The comfortable circumstances in which Welles was born gradually diminished.
During Orson's boyhood, his father grew increasingly alcoholic and not inclined to work.
His mother, once an accomplished pianist and a suffragette, became sickly.
In May of 1924, when Orson was only nine, he was summoned to his mother's sick room for what were to be some of their last moments together.
She died in a Chicago hospital two days later.
An important early influence on his life was Maurice Bernstein, an orthopedist and passionate admirer of his mother until her death in 1926.
By every account, Orson found formal education to be tedious.
But in 1926, just as his unhappy childhood was gradually slipping into a lonely adolescence, a rescue arrived when he was enrolled in the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois.
At age 11 he was introduced to the school's revered headmaster, the man who became his first real father, Roger Hill.
It was at the Todd School where Welles was given free access to the campus theater and its printing press that the empresario was truly born.
Encouraged and nurtured by the Hills, Orson wrote, directed and performed a variety of roles, including that of the Virgin Mary in the school nativity play.
While at the Todd School, Welles made his first film, Heart of Age, a four-minute short co-directed with another student, William Vance, starring Virginia Nicholson, also a Todd student, who would later become Orson's first wife.
In later years, when asked about this early work, Orson snorted that it really wasn't really a movie at all, shrugging it off as a mere satire, a youthful impetuosity.
His formal education ended with a graduation in 1931.
By the age of 20, Welles was a star on stage.
Next he conquered radio, becoming the voice of the shadow and co-founding the famous Mercury Theater of the Air, the group's radio dramatization of H.G. Welles' War of the Worlds on October 30, 1930.
On October 30, 1938, set off a national panic that Martians were actually invading New Jersey.
Hollywood recognized his talent and he and his company of actors, including Joseph Cotton and Agnes Moorhead, soon found themselves in Los Angeles courtesy of the RKO Studios.
Citizen Kane, the group's first production, became one of the most influential films of all time, both for its artistic merit in use of flashback, deep-focus photography and unusual camera angles, and for its eerie prescience.
For like Charles Foster Kane, the character he played, George Orson Welles' life and career would soar and sink at dizzying intervals that would completely crush a lesser man and artist.
Welles knew, of course, that he could never follow up the success of Citizen Kane, but that didn't stop him from trying.
The Magnificent Ambersons 1943, Lady from Shanghai 1952, Macbeth 1952, Touch of Evil 1959, and Chimes at Midnight 1968 are all either noble failures or visionary masterpieces, depending upon which critic you read.
And while he had trouble finding financing for his own pictures after Citizen Kane, Welles acted in other directors' projects to pay the bills, most notably in Carol Reed's The Third Man in 1949.
Welles was married three times, including a five-year hitch to Rita Hayworth.
He indulged a passion for food, alcohol and cigars his entire life, a life which ended with him grossly overweight and dead of a heart attack at the age of 70.
But the films live on, especially Citizen Kane, which several film industry polls have voted the greatest film of all time.
Orson remained active in radio throughout his career, later starring in the BBC series The Third Man based on his 1949 film and The Black Museum.
He also made television appearances, did voiceovers and recordings, and occasional commercials until his death in 1985.
Despite his lack of commercial success, Welles remains one of the most well-known and discussed and important directors in the history of motion pictures.
Orson Welles died October 10, 1985 in Los Angeles, California.
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