- Born
- Died
- Birth nameGeorge Orson Welles
- Nickname
- The Great One
- Height6′ (1.83 m)
- His father, Richard Head Welles, was a well-to-do inventor, his mother, Beatrice (Ives) Welles, a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died in 1924 (when he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. He was orphaned at 15 after his father's death in 1930 and became the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein of Chicago. In 1931, he graduated from the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. He turned down college offers for a sketching tour of Ireland. He tried unsuccessfully to enter the London and Broadway stages, traveling some more in Morocco and Spain, where he fought in the bullring.
Recommendations by Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott got him into Katharine Cornell's road company, with which he made his New York debut as Tybalt in 1934. The same year, he married, directed his first short, and appeared on radio for the first time. He began working with John Houseman and formed the Mercury Theatre with him in 1937. In 1938, they produced "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", famous for its broadcast version of "The War of the Worlds" (intended as a Halloween prank). His first film to be seen by the public was Citizen Kane (1941), a commercial failure losing RKO $150,000, but regarded by many as the best film ever made. Many of his subsequent films were commercial failures and he exiled himself to Europe in 1948.
In 1956, he directed Touch of Evil (1958); it failed in the United States but won a prize at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. In 1975, in spite of all his box-office failures, he received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1984, the Directors Guild of America awarded him its highest honor, the D.W. Griffith Award. His reputation as a filmmaker steadily climbed thereafter.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan < stephan@cc.wwu.edu>
- SpousesPaola Mori(May 8, 1955 - October 10, 1985) (his death, 1 child)Rita Hayworth(September 7, 1943 - November 10, 1947) (divorced, 1 child)Virginia Nicolson(November 14, 1934 - February 1, 1940) (divorced, 1 child)
- Children
- ParentsRichard Head WellesBeatrice Ives
- RelativesRichard Ives Welles(Sibling)
- One of the most recognizable deep voices in all of film, radio or television.
- Frequently cast Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Oja Kodar, Everett Sloane, Akim Tamiroff, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford and Paul Stewart.
- Frequently wrote, directed, and/or starred in films that feature the rise and fall of the main character, often unmade by their own vices: Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941), George Amberson Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Macbeth in Macbeth (1948), Othello in Othello (1951), Gregory Arkadin in Confidential Report (1955), Detective Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958), Sir John Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1965), and Jake Hannaford in The Other Side of the Wind (2018).
- Known for his use of low camera angles, tracking shots, deep focus, overlapping dialogue, expressionistic lighting and elaborate crane shots in his films.
- Frequently worked with filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich, John Huston and Oja Kodar, cinematographer Gary Graver, and composers Bernard Herrmann, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino and Michel Legrand.
- He was George Lucas' first choice as the voice for Darth Vader in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), but he thought the voice would be too recognizable. However, Welles did narrate the trailers for the film.
- He died only two hours after being interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show (1962) on October 10, 1985. Reportedly, Welles died working with a typewriter in his lap.
- When execs at RKO could not decide to greenlight Citizen Kane (1941), Welles asked the studio for film equipment and a small crew so he could spend the midway time doing test shots. Not wanting its new import from New York to sour on his deal with RKO, the studio granted the request. Welles proceeded to shoot actual scenes of the movie. By the time execs realized what he had done, Welles had many key scenes completed. RKO greenlit the movie, having already--albeit unknowingly--financed the picture.
- In the 1930s, he worked at various radio stations in New York City, at different times of the day. He found this difficult to be on time for his live shows because he had to use taxicabs and the heavy New York City traffic meant that he was often late. He soon found a loophole in the law that said you didn't have to be sick to hire an ambulance, so he did just that and had the drivers blast their sirens as he traveled from one station to the next, and that way he was on time.
- H.G. Wells was driving through San Antonio, Texas, and stopped to ask the way. The person he happened to ask was none other than Orson Welles, who had recently broadcast "The War of the Worlds" on the radio. They got on well and spent the day together.
- Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit.
- [on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
- I'm not very fond of movies. I don't go to them much.
- I started at the top and worked down.
- I'm not bitter about Hollywood's treatment of me, but over its treatment of D.W. Griffith, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton and a hundred others.
- History of the World: Part I (1981) - $25 .000
- The Kremlin Letter (1970) - $50,000
- Compulsion (1959) - $100,000
- The Roots of Heaven (1958) - settlement of debts worth $15,000
- Touch of Evil (1958) - $125,000
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