Orson Welles

George Orson Welles, better known as Orson Welles (Kenosha, Wisconsin, May 6, 1915-Los Angeles, California, October 10, 1985), was an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and radio host.

Considered one of the most versatile artists of the XX century in the field of theatre, radio and cinema, he achieved success at the age of twenty-three thanks to the radio play The War of the Worlds, which caused a stir in the United States when many listeners to the program thought it was an actual broadcast of an alien invasion. This sensational debut earned him a three-film contract with the RKO film studio, which gave him complete freedom in making it. Despite these benefits, only one of his planned projects was able to see the light of day: Citizen Kane (1941), his most successful film.

In 1946, on suspicion of being a communist, his Hollywood career stalled and he was forced to move to Europe, where he worked as an actor to finance his productions, something typical of the McCarthyism period, during which numerous characters from public life were accused of belonging to this ideological current and, with it, being enemies of the United States. About the time, Welles himself wrote: «The bad thing about the American left is that he betrayed to save his pools. And there was no American right in my generation. They did not exist intellectually. There were only lefts and they betrayed each other. Because the left was not destroyed by McCarthy; they themselves were demolished giving way to a new generation of nihilists». Despite his persecution and due to his triumph in Europe, in 1958 Welles was able to return to Hollywood for the filming of his film Touch of Evil among other titles of capital relevance in his career..

Among his many other projects, he has produced and directed films such as Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) -adaptations of plays by William Shakespeare-, The process (1962) -adapted from the homonymous book by Franz Kafka- and F for Fake (1973), among others. His last appearance was on television, making a cameo in the television series Moonlight ; he died five days before the episode aired. His fame grew after his death in 1985 and he is now considered one of the greatest film and stage directors of the century XX. In 2002 he was chosen by the British Film Institute as the best director in the history of cinema.

Career

Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the second son of Beatrice Ives, a pianist and suffragette who had served time for her strongly radical political views, and Richard Welles, an owner of a chain of truck factories and an amateur inventor from a wealthy family from Virginia. From his birth, Welles received an unconventional upbringing from his eclectic and wealthy parents, who treated him like the prodigy of the family and directed his precocious talents towards different forms of art. Little Orson quickly learned his mother's teachings and soon took up painting.

Early Years

Welles made his first stage appearance at the age of three in a performance of the play Samson and Delilah, at the Chicago Opera House. In 1919 his parents separated and Orson took up residence with his mother in Chicago, where he began to enter artistic and intellectual circles. On May 10, 1924, Beatrice Welles died suddenly of jaundice at the age of forty-three. After the loss of his mother, Welles returns to live with his father and abandons his musical career forever.

Dr. Maurice Bernstein, an old friend of the Welles family and former suitor to his late mother, encouraged the boy's love of the theater by giving him a magic lantern, a picture frame, and a puppet theater. At the age of ten, while studying in elementary school in Madison, Wisconsin, Welles dedicated himself to giving school presentations and directed and starred in his first theatrical performance, The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . Soon after, he entered the Todd School in Illinois, an avant-garde school directed by Professor Roger Hill, who Welles cited on numerous occasions as his mentor and the person who supplied him with the artistic and literary ideas on which he based all his future work.

Theater and radio

Orson Welles in 1938

In 1931, at age 16, Welles began working on the stage in Dublin, Ireland. He soon moved to New York, where he made his Broadway debut the following year with the performance of Romeo and Juliet. From 1936 to 1938 Welles directed high-profile stage productions for the Federal Theater Project, including an adaptation of Macbeth with an all-African-American cast that was to be dubbed "Voodoo Macbeth" for its setting in Haiti and the substitution of witches in Shakespeare's plays for voodoo sorceresses.

He later founded the Mercury Theater company, with which he achieved great success. In 1938, along with several colleagues from his company, he performed on CBS radio an adaptation of H. G. Wells' play The War of the Worlds. The realism was such that the broadcast caused a real panic in New Jersey, where, according to the work, the invasion of the aliens was taking place. This episode gave him worldwide fame, which led RKO Pictures to hire him in 1939 with full freedom to write, produce and direct two films.

The international context of 1939 —instability in Europe, the start of World War II— also contributed to enhancing the effect that Welles' performance had on an audience that was highly sensitive to those events.

Citizen Kane

Until then, Welles's experience as a filmmaker had been almost nil, so he began to internalize the technique and language of cinema, also contributing with his own visual style, unprecedented for the time, such as the use of "documentary" within the story itself. He was 24 years old when he convinced screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz to write a story based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper magnate who owned two major newspapers. After some tweaks he himself made to the script, Welles directed the film under the title Citizen Kane. Hearst tried to ban the screening, but it was released in 1941 to great critical acclaim, although not at the box office, due to distribution obstacles promoted by Hearst.

1940s

Welles during the shooting The magnificent Ambersons

For the screenplay of his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles was based on the novel The magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (Pulitzer Prize winner in 1919). The film reflected the life of an American family at the beginning of the 20th century. Welles's final cut was altered by RKO to such an extent that the filmmaker said they had ruined his work. Nevertheless, the film retains the creative vigor of Citizen Kane.

With The Stranger (1946) Welles took charge of a project in which, as he himself admitted, his personal involvement was minimal. Despite everything, he showed that he also knew how to be an efficient craftsman.

The Lady from Shanghai (1948), with its typical thriller appearance, and similar in several aspects to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) —the city of San Francisco, California, Rita Hayworth's dyed hair, gray tailored suit—transcended the boundaries of the genre and a convoluted plot, to become a spider's web that grips the viewer with a rare fascination. The scene in the gallery of mirrors is especially remembered.

Years of Maturity

Welles en The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

Mr. Arkadin (1954) suffered from a plot that seemed to want to take advantage of many of the premises of Citizen Kane , as well as from an inadequate cast if we except the interpretation of Welles himself in the leading role of the.

Thirst for evil (Touch of Evil, 1958) is his second masterpiece after Citizen Kane. In this captivating thriller, Welles reserved the role of an obese police inspector who used methods of more than dubious ethics until he got to murder. The film travels through a dream world and sickly environments that have echoes of Shakespearean drama. The film was very touched in the editing, and even shots and brief scenes were added; today he has recovered as far as possible with Welles's plan (which he exposed in a memoir of more than 50 pp. his specific criticism of that manipulation).

In The Trial (1962) Welles tried to adapt Franz Kafka's novel using his particular film style. The overall result was uneven, although outstanding in many scenes for its ability to create a world parallel to Kafka's.

Welles offered a highly personal and intense vision of Shakespeare's world in three films widely accepted as masterpieces: Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and Chimes at midnight (1966). The latter, inspired by various works by the English playwright, is a monument of visual inventiveness and interpretive mastery. The film has as its common thread Sir John Falstaff, played by Welles himself.

Latest works

Orson Welles in 1973, photogram of the documentary Who's Out There?

In 1970, Welles began filming The Other Side of the Wind. The film chronicles the efforts of a film director (played by John Huston) to complete his latest Hollywood movie and is set at a huge party. In 1972, Welles reported that filming was 96% complete, although by 1979 Welles had only edited about 40 minutes of the film. In that year, legal complications of film ownership put the negatives in a Paris vault. In 2004, director Peter Bogdanovich, who starred in the film, announced his intention to complete production.

On October 28, 2014, Los Angeles-based production company Royal Road Entertainment announced that it had negotiated a deal, with the help of producer Frank Marshall, and would purchase the rights to complete and release The Other Side of the Wind. Bogdanovich and Marshall planned to complete Welles' near-finished film in Los Angeles, with the goal of having it ready for a May 6, 2015, release, the 100th anniversary of Welles's birth. Royal Road Entertainment and German producer Jens Koethner Kaul acquired the rights from Les Films de l'Astrophore and the late Mehdi Boushehri. They reached an agreement with Oja Kodar, who inherited Welles's estate of the film, and Beatrice Welles, manager of Welles' estate, but as of late 2015, efforts to complete the film were at a standstill.

In March 2017, Netflix acquired the distribution rights to the film. That month, the original negative, diaries, and other images arrived in Los Angeles for post-production; the film was completed in 2018 and premiered at the 75th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2018.

On November 2, 2018, the film debuted in select theaters and on Netflix, forty-eight years after filming began.

Some footage is included in the documentaries Working with Orson Welles (1993), Orson Welles: One Man Band (1995), and more broadly They Will Love Me when I'm dead (2018).

In 1973, Welles premiered F de Falso (in Spain, Fraude), an experimental film posed as a mockumentary that anticipated some proposals in cinema postmodern and that was recognized as influential by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard. Picasso and Oja Kodar appear in the film.

In 1976, he recorded his voice reciting Edgar Allan Poe for the famous album "Tales of Mystery and Imagination", by the Alan Parsons Project. Curiously, he never had contact with any member of the group (he never met Parsons in person), while they worked on the piece in England, Welles did so in studios in the United States. Due to technical problems at the time, his participation was not included in the first editions of the work (Alan was very demanding and this caused a technological problem that caused the cancellation of several sound tracks in the final recording, including Welles's voice). In 2007, the album was remastered, and thanks to current technical improvements, all the canceled tracks were included, bringing back Welles' deep voice and superb reciting.

In 1979, he narrated the English version of A Step Away, the official film of the VIII Pan American Games, held in Puerto Rico in 1979. This narration was the last one he did for a feature film. The film A Step Away, was restored in 2010 in audio and video. The audio of Orson Welles's voice was taken from an original LP recording of the film's soundtrack.

His last appearance was in October 1985, in the television series Moonlight, where he made a cameo and introduced episode 4 of the second season "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice", tribute to the film noir of the 40s.

His last work was in the 1986 film Transformers: The Movie, where he voiced the evil world-devouring transformer planet Unicron. It appears that he passed away just a few days before completing the work and rumor has it that Leonard Nimoy (Galvatron) did it for him, though voice-over director Wally Burr and actress Susan Blu (Arcee) have denied this.

Prolific and cool

A prolific actor, Welles often used his acting work to finance his directing projects. He was one of the most talented directors in the history of cinema. Citizen Kane, at the time and now, represented (and still represents) a prodigy of cinematographic technique and narrative. The opening sequence shot of Touch of Evil (an uninterrupted take of several minutes) demonstrates a mastery of mise-en-scène and movement organization that only a filmmaker of his category could achieve, although he did not he appreciated such shots excessively. Even seemingly minor works, such as The Stranger, bear traces of his great talent.

Sometimes it is difficult to establish the exact chronology of his filmography due to the films he started and could not finish due to lack of financing.

Orson Welles and Shakespeare

Orson Welles has always called William Shakespeare “the staff of life” or perhaps he always meant the staff of his own existence. In his childhood, little Welles liked to read the works of the magnanimous Shakespeare. And since he is his age, he wanted to play and have fun with those fantastic stories. However, he did it in an unconventional and admirable way for his contemporaries: In the short ten summers of him he already adapted dramas from his favorite author. Later, a teenage Welles played "Shakespearean" in school performances. Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Falstaff, Brutus, Claudius; all of them were transformed by him into something more than traditional figures elaborated through the centuries. At barely 20 years old, thanks to the Mercury Theatre, he staged two novel versions of Shakespeare: a Macbeth , performed by blacks and set in Haiti, and a Julius Caesar set in the aesthetics of mass concentrations. This is how Orson Welles prepares the cinematographic ground and makes the outline of what, in the future, a Welles-Filmmaker will produce.

"At his institute he performs several productions of Shakespeare, the author he will never abandon in his career, both for the texts represented and for the spirit that animates his own creations."

Shakespeare's world is present both in the adaptations Macbeth (1948) and in Othello (1952), which rolls as an unprecedented film theater conviction, as in Chimes at midnight (1966), where he appropriates the playwright's characters to develop the themes of power, ambition and imposture, also present in two oas that formally belong to film noir or police: The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Touch of Evil (1958). By using Elizabethan sources in his films, Welles provides the background to much of his contemporary work. In many ways he likes the same themes that Shakespeare preferred: the fall of a great figure, passion ruled by a bad star, the many facets of camaraderie. However, neither in Macbeth nor in Othello has he shown strict fidelity to the letter of the works. For fans of Shakespearean verse, these two films lack appeal. However, cinematically, it has enormous barbaric force. If they seem melodramatic, it is due to Welles's firm belief that “Shakespeare never wrote pure tragedy: he couldn't do it. He wrote melodramas that had tragic stature but were nonetheless all melodramatic stories.”

On filming Shakespeare's plays, Welles comments: "One method of getting away from triviality is to go back to our classics and for this reason we see filmmakers experiment with Shakespeare, some disastrously and some otherwise." Like the Elizabethan theater he loves so much, his own universe, cinema, is filled to overflowing with a rich cast of characters, jesters mixed with kings and villains mixed with innocent men.

Private life

Orson Welles along with Dolores del Río

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 actress Rita Hayworth.

His love for Spain was well known, which is why he shot several of his films on Spanish lands, 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 in the time, like Antonio Ordóñez or 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 deposited in the Malaga municipality of Ronda, in the San Cayetano recreational farm, owned by his friend, the bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez, according to what he had expressed. However, there are other versions in which it is said that Orson Welles did not leave any will where he expressed his wishes after his death, for which reason both his daughter and his wife agreed that his ashes should be scattered in Spain, since they agreed that this was the place where Welles felt happiest in the course of his life.

Filmography

As director

• 1938 - Too Much Johnson - missing and recovered in 2013.
• 1941 - Citizen Kane (Citizen Kane / Citizen)
• 1942 - The Magnificent Ambersons (Sovereignty/ The magnificent Ambersons / The fourth commandment)
• 1942 - It's all true - Unfinished film
• 1942 - Tanks (Tanks) - Unpublished and unknown film
• 1946 - The Stranger (The stranger)
• 1947 The Lady from Shanghai (The Lady of Shanghai)
• 1947 Macbeth (Macbeth)
• 1952 - OTHER
• 1955 - Mr. Arkadin (Mister Arkadin/Confidential report)
• 1955 - The Land of the Basques (The land of the Basques) - Documentary for the BBC
• 1956 - Moonraker - Unknown film in argument.
• 1957 - Touch of Evil (You're wrong. / Shadows of evil)
• 1962 - The process (The Trial), based on The processFranz Kafka's novel.
• 1965 - Campanadas at midnight (Falstaff / Chimes at Midnight), about Shakespeare's works
• 1967 - The Deep - Unfinished film
• 1968 - An immortal story (The immortal story)
• 1968 - Tepepa - Giulio Petroni music by Ennio Morricone
• 1969 - Don Quixote de Orson Welles - unfinished film (although mounted in 1992 by Jesus Franco).
• 1973 - F for Fake (F de Falso / False / Fraud)
• 1978 - Filming Othello
• 2018 - The Other Side of the Wind (The other side of the windfilmed between 1970 and 1976

Radius

• 1938 - The War of the Worlds (War of the Worlds)

As an actor

• 1941 - Citizen Kane (The Citizen / Citizen KaneWelles
• 1943 - Journey into Fear (Istanbul), Norman Foster (but started by Welles).
• 1944 - Jane Eyre (Jane Eyre) by Robert Stevenson
• 1945 - The stranger (The StrangerWelles
• 1947 The Lady from Shanghai (The Lady of ShanghaiWelles
• 1947 Macbeth (MacbethWelles
• 1952 - OTHER (OthelloWelles
• 1949 - The third man (The Third Man) of Carol Reed
• 1949 - Cagliostro (Black Magic), by Gregory Ratoff and Welles
• 1949 - Prince of the foxes (Prince of Foxes) of Henry King
• 1950 - The black rose (The Black RoseHenry Hathaway
• 1953 - Trent's Last CaseHerbert Wilcox
• 1966 - Napoleon of Sacha Guitry
• 1956 - Moby Dick (Moby Dick) by John Huston
• 1957 - Touch of Evil (Sed de MalWelles
• 1958 - The long and warm summer (The long hot summerMartin Ritt.
• 1959 - Compulsion
• 1962 - The process (The TrialWelles
• 1963 - Ro.Go.Pa.G (directed by Godard, Pasolini,Rossellini and Gregoretti)
• 1965 - Campanadas at midnight (Chimes at MidnightWelles
• 1966 - A Man for All SeasonsFred Zinnemann
• 1966 - Arde Paris? (Is Paris burning?), by René Clément
• 1967 - Casino Royale (Casino Royale) by John Huston
• 1968 - An immortal story (The immortal storyWelles
• 1968 - Castle of cards (House of Cards) by John Guillermin
• 1969 - Which one? (The Thirteen Chairs), by Nicolas Gessner and Luciano Lucignani
• 1970 - The Battle of the Neretva River (Bitka na Neretvi / The Battle of NeretvaVeljko Bulajić
• 1971 - The Prodigious Decade (La Décade prodigieuse) by Claude Chabrol
• 1971 - Malpertuis by Harry Kümel
• 1972 - The Treasure IslandJohn Hough and Andrea Bianchi
• 1973 - Fraud (F for FakeWelles
• 1979 - A Step Away, Official Film VIII Pan American Games 1979, San Juan de Puerto Rico (Last story for a feature film - 140mins.)
• 1979 - The Muppet MovieJames Frawley. I change like Lew Lord.
• 1980 - The secret of Tesla (Tajna Nikole Tesle) of Krsto Papic
• 1984 - In Our HandsRobert Richter and Stanley Warnow
• 1986 - The Transformers the movie (voz/Unicron)
• 1986 - Hot Moneyof Zale Magder and George McCowan

As a narrator

• 1958 - South Seas Adventure, feature film.
• 1958 - Les seigneurs de la forêt, documentary.
• 1965 - A King's Story, documentary.
• 1967 - Ten days that shook the world, documentary.
• 1971 - Sentries of silenceshort film.
• 1973 - Orson Welles' Great Mysteriesseries.
• 1976 - NBC: The First Fifty Years, documentary.
• 1976 - The New Deal for Artists, documentary.
• 1978 - The Late Great Planet Earth, feature film.
• 1981 - Nostradamus Prophecies, documentary.
• 1981 - The crazy history of the World, feature film.
• 1984 - The Last Sailors: The Final Days of Working Sail, documentary.
• 1984 - Almonds and Raisins, documentary.

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Cannes International Film Festival

Venice International Film Festival