Orson Welles: Actor, Director, Writer, Legend, And Eventual Magician

By | May 3, 2020

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(Janus Films)

Reaching the zenith of your career in your twenties has to be maddening. Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane when he was only 25 years old, and even though he never won an Academy Award, he created what's still known as modern filmmaking. We think of him as a legendary filmmaker today, but while Welles was alive, he was regarded as a joke and a has-been. War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane were monumental achievements that he never really topped, not in the eyes of critics at the time, but Welles never stopped dreaming.

Orson Welles, Cheese Head

Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin on May 6, 1915, George Orson Welles grew up in a broken home. His father was an alcoholic who squandered his earnings from his invention of the bicycle lamp, his brother was institutionalized, and his mother died of hepatitis in 1924, just after his ninth birthday. In his youth, Welles was interested in music, but following his mother's death, he gave up this pursuit and embarked upon a chaotic, transient life with his father.

Welles and his father moved from place to place until the young man was enrolled in the Todd Seminary for Boys, where he was encouraged to experiment with art. His first forays into radio took place while attending this school. After his father died, he decided against attending college, instead using his small inheritance to travel through Europe.

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(Pinterest)

Orson Welles, Shakespeare Lover

While traveling through Europe in the 1930s, Welles took his first job in the theater at the Gate Theatre in Dublin after strutting in and claiming to be a Broadway star. Hilton Edwards, the manager of the company, recalled that he didn't believe Welles but appreciated the kid's chutzpah. On October 13, 1931, he appeared in Ashley Dukes's adaptation of Jew Suss as Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg.

Welles could have continued acting in Europe, but he threw himself into a project called Everybody's Shakespeare, a collection of educational books about the Bard. At the time, Welles was deep in the middle of studying Shakespeare and felt that his own writing would never stand up the most beloved plays of all time. He wrote to friend and former guardian Roger Hill:

I'll be relieved when I can get this off in the mails. The mere presence of Shakespeare's script worries me. What right have I to give credulous and believing innocents an inflection for his mighty lines? Who am I to say that this one is "tender" and this one is said "angrily" and this "with a smile?" There are as many interpretations for characters in Caesar as there are in God's spacious firmament. What nerve I have to pick out one of them and cram it down any child's throat, coloring, perhaps permanently, his whole conception of the play?