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biography
| name: |
Welles, (George) Orson
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1915–85)
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| biography:
| Stage and film actor, and director, born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, USA. The son of a wealthy inventor and a concert pianist, he was a precocious child who staged mini-productions of Shakespeare in his house. When his mother died (1925), he went on a world tour with his father, then attended a private school in Illinois where he continued to direct plays (1926–31). With his father's death (1927), he became the ward of a Chicago physician, Dr Maurice Bernstein. Welles turned down college and set off for Ireland on a sketching tour - he had shown talent as an artist - and ended up acting with Dublin's famous Gate Theatre (1931). He returned to the USA in 1932, toured with Katharine Cornell's road company, and made his Broadway debut (as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet) in 1934, the year he also gave his first radio performance. With John Houseman he collaborated on productions for the Phoenix Theatre Group and the Federal Theater Project, and they co-founded the Mercury Theatre (1937), noted for such productions as an all African-American Macbeth. In 1938, Welles and Houseman began to produce plays on their Mercury Theatre on the Air, and on 30 October that year, as a Halloween spoof, they broadcast a dramatization of H G Wells's War of the Worlds, so realistic in conveying a Martian invasion that it led to actual panic throughout the USA. His growing reputation led to his appointment by RKO in Hollywood, but none of his initial projects got into production. Then he made Citizen Kane (1941), which despite its success with critics and a few metropolitan audiences, was not all that successful at the time. Two more films, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Lady from Shanghai (1948), were heavily edited by the studios, and only years later recognized as superb works. From this point on, Welles suffered from his reputation as an erratic film-maker who was unable to hold to budgets or schedules, and he would spend the rest of his life forced to seek financing for his projects. By c.1946 he was effectively in exile in Europe, where he continued acting in films, including The Third Man (1949), to earn enough money to finance his own productions, such as Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1966). Back in the USA by the mid-1970s, he found himself honoured as one of the true geniuses of American films, but thereafter he was reduced to appearances in grade-B films, television talk shows, and television commercials. Several times divorced, overweight, with a resumé that included many failed projects, he would have seemed a failure at his death, had his rich life not produced so many original works. |
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