🇺🇸Orson
Welles

He was twenty-five years old when he walked onto the RKO lot in Hollywood with a contract that gave him total creative control over the production — something no studio had ever offered a first-time director — and proceeded to make a film that critics still rank, eighty years later, as the greatest in the history of the medium. Citizen Kane arrived in 1941, and it rewrote the grammar of cinema: its non-linear narrative structure, deep-focus photography, low-angle shots, and pioneering use of sound design were not merely novel techniques but a coherent new language that filmmakers are still speaking today. Orson Welles had been called a genius since he was a teenager. He earned the word at twenty-five. He then spent the next forty years making films that studios cut, reedited, and shelved, fighting for money, working across Europe and America on whatever projects he could finance, and remaining — despite everything — one of the most original creative minds in the history of American art.

George Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father, Richard Welles, was a failed inventor and itinerant businessman; his mother, Beatrice, was an accomplished pianist who died when Orson was nine. His childhood was spent largely in hotels and boarding houses, in the company of a rotating cast of adults who recognized his exceptional intelligence and fed it. He could read by age three. He was performing magic tricks and putting on puppet shows by five. By ten he had read large portions of Shakespeare, and his school productions at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, were so sophisticated that the school's drama teacher, Roger Hill, effectively gave him free rein over the entire theatre program. He directed his first stage production — a full-scale Shakespeare — at sixteen.

At seventeen, Welles bluffed his way into a professional acting job in Dublin by presenting himself at the Gate Theatre as a celebrated star of the New York stage. He was completely unknown. The Gate's directors, Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir, saw through the pretense immediately and hired him anyway, recognizing something extraordinary in the raw talent before them. He played major roles in a dozen productions during his Dublin season, returned to America, studied with the director Katharine Cornell, and by 1937 — at twenty-two — was directing and producing for the Federal Theatre Project in New York, where his all-Black production of Macbeth, set in Haiti, became the most celebrated theatrical event in the city that year. His Mercury Theatre company, founded with producer John Houseman, staged some of the most innovative productions in Broadway history.

The War of the Worlds radio broadcast on October 30, 1938, made Welles nationally famous overnight. His adaptation of H.G. Wells's novel, performed as a series of simulated news bulletins interrupting a programme of dance music, reportedly caused widespread panic among listeners who tuned in late and believed a Martian invasion was actually occurring. The panic was, by most accounts, considerably exaggerated in subsequent newspaper coverage — but the broadcast demonstrated, unmistakably, the power of Welles's theatrical imagination and his understanding of the medium he was working in. RKO Pictures offered him an unprecedented contract: two films, complete creative control, final cut. He used it to make Citizen Kane.

Kane was a thinly veiled portrait of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, constructed as a mystery — a reporter investigating the meaning of a dying man's last word, "Rosebud" — that spirals outward into a meditation on power, memory, and the impossibility of knowing another person completely. Hearst, unsurprisingly, despised the film and used his newspaper empire to suppress it. The film received nine Academy Award nominations and won only one — Best Original Screenplay, shared by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz — partly due to Hearst's influence and partly due to the Hollywood establishment's resentment of an outsider who had arrived demanding and receiving privileges no one else had. It was a commercial disappointment. It has been continuously ranked the greatest film ever made since 1952, when the British film journal Sight & Sound first polled international critics.

The remainder of Welles's career was a sustained act of genius practiced under conditions of chronic financial constraint and institutional hostility. His follow-up film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was taken from him by RKO, cut by fifty minutes, and released on a double bill with a horror comedy. His masterpiece Touch of Evil was similarly reedited without his consent. He spent decades in Europe financing films through acting work, narrating documentaries, and whatever else paid. He completed Chimes at Midnight — widely considered his greatest performance as an actor, playing Falstaff — in 1965. He worked on The Other Side of the Wind from 1970 until his death in 1985; it was finally completed and released posthumously in 2018. He died in Los Angeles at seventy, alone, at his typewriter. On it was a script he had been working on that morning.