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George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October
10, 1985) is generally considered one of
Hollywood's greatest film director|directors, as
well as a fine actor, broadcaster and
screenwriter. His first feature film, Citizen Kane
(1941), is universally acknowledged as an
important step in the history of cinema and widely
cited by critics as among Movies that have been
considered the greatest ever|the best films ever
made.

==Early career==
Welles was born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  He
had an unusual childhood, being somewhat of a
prodigy, and his personal relationships suffered
as a result. His mother died when he was nine, and
his father, Richard Head Welles, receded into the
past, a drunkard. 

Welles made his first plays while at the Todd
School and was brought under the guidance of the
principal, Roger Hill, who became a surrogate
father to Welles. The sometimes seen work Hearts
of Age was made there while he was a student and
also stars his first wife, Virginia Nicholson. He
later made his stage debut at the famous Gate
Theatre in Dublin, Ireland in 1931 when he talked
himself onto the stage and appeared in small
supporting roles, and by 1934 was a radio
director/actor in the United States, working with
some of the  cast that later became the Mercury
Theatre.  In that year, he married the actress and
socialite Virginia Nicholson.  Welles drew a great
deal of attention in 1937 with a production of
William Shakespeare|Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
(play)|Julius Caesar set in Fascism|Fascist Italy
and a voodoo-themed version of Macbeth featuring a
primarily African American cast. Shortly
afterward, he and producer John Houseman founded
the Mercury Theatre company.


Welles began playing The Shadow in late 1937; his
deep voice suited the role well. In the summer of
1938, Welles and the Mercury Theatre began weekly
broadcasts of short radio plays based on classic
or popular literary works.  Their October 30
broadcast of that year was an adaptation of The
War of the Worlds (radio)|The War of the Worlds. 
This brought Welles his first public notoriety on
a national level—the program created panic
among some listeners who found it completely
convincing.  Welles's adaptation of H. G. Wells's
classic novel simulated a news broadcast, cutting
into a routine dance music program to describe the
landing of Mars (planet)|Martian spacecraft in
Grovers Mill, New Jersey.  The innovative
broadcast was realistic enough to frighten many in
the audience into believing that an actual Martian
invasion was in progress. Recordings of the
broadcast are still available (see old-time radio
and also the UK Region 2 DVD of Citizen Kane). The
publicity that resulted from this led to the offer
of a three-picture Hollywood contract from RKO.

==Welles in Hollywood==

Welles toyed with various ideas for his first
project for RKO, settling briefly on an adaptation
of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness before
ultimately rejecting it. RKOs budget projections
made it impractical. In a display of his avant
garde sensibility, Welles' plans for that project
included filming the action entirely from the
protagonist's point of view.

Welles was once again the centre of controversy
with his first film, Citizen Kane (1941 in
film|1941). The gossip writer Louella Parsons
convinced the yellow journalism|yellow-press
magnate, William Randolph Hearst, that he was the
basis for Charles Foster Kane|Kane, with the
result that Hearst's media empire boycotted the
film. On its release, this event overshadowed the
film's radical formal innovations. Welles is said
to have sardonically remarked, concerning Hearst's
attitude, that if he were to do a movie about the
journalism magnate, the fact would be more grand
and shockingly unbelievable than the fiction. This
possibly apocryphal quote is uttered by Liev
Schreiber (as Welles) in the 1999 TV movie RKO
281.  

Welles' second film for RKO was the more
traditional The Magnificent Ambersons, adapted
from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth
Tarkington, and on which RKO executives hoped to
make back the money lost by Citizen
Kane's relative commercial
failure. 

Simultaneously, Welles worked with his Mercury
Theatre fellows on a spy thriller, Journey Into
Fear, which he co-wrote with Joseph Cotten. In
addition to acting in the film, Welles was also a
producer.  Direction was credited solely to Norman
Foster (director)|Norman Foster, but the film
contains several Expressionism (film)|
expressionistic sequences indicating input by
Welles.  Welles denied having directed the film,
but the visual style is very similar to his
credited works.  Whatever the case, Welles played
a major role in its production, but he expressed
disappointment at the finished product. 

During the production of Amberson's, Welles was
asked to make a documentary film about South
America on behalf of the U. S. Government. Welles
left the United States to begin shooting this
documentary after putting together the first rough
cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, on the
understanding that further editing decisions would
be carried out via telegram. At this point RKO, in
a perilous financial situation and fearing another
commercial failure, wrested control of the film
from Welles' Mercury Productions staff, cut over
fifty minutes of footage, and added a reshot,
upbeat ending: the cut footage, including Welles's
original ending to the film, has been lost,
apparently permanently. This event marked the
beginning of a recurring pattern in Welles'
Hollywood career of damaging executive
interference.  Ironically, Welles' South American
documentary, entitled It's All True, never saw
completion in Welles' lifetime. The surviving
footage was released in 1993.

In 1946, International Pictures released The
Stranger (1946 movie)|The Stranger, starring
Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young as well as
Welles himself.  Sam Spiegel produced the film,
which gave Welles an opportunity to
salvage—briefly—his reputation in Hollywood. 
A Film noir|noir-ish suspense film about the hunt
for a Nazi war criminal, The Stranger was Welles'
only commercial success as a director.  Welles
supposedly made the film to prove that he could
make a conventional picture within time and budget
constraints.  He followed The Stranger with
another noir drama for Columbia Pictures, The Lady
from Shanghai. Welles played the protagonist,
while his second wife, Rita Hayworth, played one
of the villains.  Hayworth said of Orson Welles,
"...a most brilliant auteur and lover.  I just
wish he hadn't become so fat.  It affected his
performance in movies and the bedroom."  Like The
Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai
suffered heavy editing by its studio, and the
excised portions are believed to be lost
permanently.  Columbia removed an hour of footage
from Welles' final cut.  Welles' notes for the
film suggest that the excised footage would have
aided audiences' comprehension of the story. 
Despite the editing, the theatrical cut still
contains many examples of Welles' Expressionist
film-making.  Once released, the film was savaged
by critics for its convoluted plot, and audiences
disliked Hayworth as a villain.  Welles' marriage
to Hayworth—already troubled during
filming—ended shortly after production ended.

Welles changed studios once again, moving to
Republic Pictures, a studio with a reputation for
making B-movie|B movies.  The move marked a return
to Shakespeare for Welles—he chose to direct and
star in an idiosyncratic production of Macbeth
(1948)|Macbeth. Working with a very limited
budget, Welles fashioned a Macbeth that emphasized
the darkness of the play's themes and characters. 
Unfortunately for Welles, the finished film once
again proved unpalatable to the movie-going
public.

==Welles after Hollywood==

Frustrated by his experience with the studio
system, Welles left Hollywood in 1948. The
following year, he made a notable appearance in
front of the camera. In Graham Greene's The Third
Man, Welles (as Harry Lime) gave the infamous
"Cuckoo Clock" speech. 'In Italy for 30 years
under the Borgias they had warfare, terror,
murder, and bloodshed, but they produced
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly
love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace,
and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.' 
This is the only piece of dialogue in the film
which Greene himself did not write: Welles penned
it himself and insisted that it be put in. Greene
is reputed to have hated it (possibly because the
cuckoo clock was not, in fact, a Swiss invention).

From 1949 to 1952, Welles made a remarkable
Othello, filming the entire work on location in
Europe and Morocco. The film was not well
received, partly because the dubbing after the
fact was very poor. In 1992, this film was
restored from a nitrate negative that had been
feared lost. The entire score was rerecorded, and
the result is a powerful rendition that belies the
usual view that Welles had lost his touch. He made
a virtue of the choppiness due to having no chance
to fill holes in the studio after filming on
location. The cinemetography is remarkable, and
the entire effect gripping.

Barring a brief return in 1958 in film|1958 to
make Touch of Evil (which was also butchered by
the studio, but has since been restored to
something close to Welles' vision), the rest of
Welles' directorial career was spent in Europe,
his films self-financed with acting fees or,
later, funded by sympathetic producers. On almost
all of these projects he retained final cut, but
the independence thus gained also resulted in
drastically reduced budgets and technical
facilities. Despite such setbacks, some of Welles'
best work was produced during this period. He was
an aficionado of stage magic and often appeared at
Hollywood's Magic Castle. He even did TV,
performing a few tricks with Lucille Ball as his
assistant in an episode of I Love Lucy. In his
later years, when his weight had ballooned, he
appeared in a sketch on Johnny Carson's show,
playing an extremely heavy and tyrannical king not
unlike Henry VIII of England|Henry VIII. 

Welles starred in many of his films and wrote the
scripts, often using the talents of the Mercury
Theatre.  These included several stories from
English literature, such as Macbeth (1948 in
film|1948), Jane Eyre (which he produced
uncredited, and in which he appeared opposite Joan
Fontaine), and Chimes at Midnight (1965 in
film|1965), an underrated classic in which Welles
played Falstaff.

==Television==

A lesser known, but still important, aspect of
Welles' career was his work in television. The
Orson Welles Sketchbook (1955) was created for the
BBC and featured Welles telling stories and
drawing pictures to illustrate them. The director
also created Around the World with Orson Welles
(1955) for the BBC. In this series he gleefully
experimented with a film-essay format,
foreshadowing the later F for Fake (1974). The
Fountain of Youth (1958) was made for American TV
and in it Welles offers some possibilities for
expanding the medium's vocabulary.  The Immortal
Story (1968) was filmed for French television and
stars not only Welles himself, but also Jeanne
Moreau, one of the most loved actresses of the
French New Wave cinema; based on a short story by
Isak Dinesen, it is a spare and somber meditation
on old age, isolation, and the inability to
create. One of his most playful efforts was
Portrait of Gina (1958), in which the
director/narrator wanders through Italy, finally
arriving at Gina Lollobrigida's home at the end of
the film.  Welles continued to work in TV through
the 60s, 70s and 80s, but little of the work he
directed from this period was ever broadcast. A
version of The Merchant of Venice (1969) was not
completed because a reel was stolen and never
recovered. Clips from unfinished TV projects
appear in the documentary Orson Welles: The
One-Man Band (1995), a fascinating but bittersweet
look at many of the director's varied efforts,

==Unfinished projects==

Welles' exile from Hollywood and reliance on
independent finance meant that many of his later
cinema projects were filmed in a piecemeal fashion
and some were not completed at all. In the mid
1950s Welles worked on a film adaptation of Miguel
de Cervantes|Cervantes' Don Quixote, initially on
a commission from CBS television.  CBS were
unhappy with the original half hour television
play and rejected the footage.  Welles gleefully
took this as an opportunity to expand the film to
feature length, developing the screenplay to take
Quixote and Sancho Panza into the modern age (an
idea that later formed the basis of Jean-Marie
Poiré|Jean-Marie Poiré's Les Visiteurs). 
Filming continued in a fragmentary fashion for a
number of years whenever cast and crew could be
assembled in one place.  The project was finally
abandoned with the death of Francisco Reiguera,
the actor playing Quixote, in 1969.  An incomplete
version of the film was released in 1992.

In 1970 Welles began shooting The Other Side of
the Wind.  Finance was from a number of sources,
the largest of which being an Iranian company
based in Paris and run by the brother in law of
the Shah of Iran.  The film is apparently the
story of the efforts of a film director (played by
John Huston) to complete his last Hollywood movie
and is largely set at a lavish party.  Although in
1972 the film was reported by Welles as being "96%
complete" its legal ownership became a matter of
dispute.  Argument continued for a number of years
until the 1979 Iranian Revolution effectively
consigned it to a legal limbo.  The negative
remained in a Paris vault until in 2004 Welles's
friend Peter Bogdanovich (who also acted in the
film) announced his intention to resolve the legal
difficulties and complete the production.

Another unfinished project was The Big Brass Ring,
the script of which was adapted and filmed by
US-director George Hickenlooper in 1999.

Mark Millar wrote an article about a failed Orson
Welles Batman project.  This generated a
considerable amount of buzz, especially on Ain't
It Cool News, but the rumor has since been proven
false.

==Final years==

During his career he won one Academy Award|Oscar
and was nominated for a further four.  One of his
last notable film appearances was as Cardinal
Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons (1966 in
film|1966). In 1971 in film|1971 the Academy gave
him an Honorary award "For superlative artistry
and versatility in the creation of motion
pictures".

Overweight for decades, he became profoundly
obesity|obese in his later years.  He capitalized
on his image in various advertising campaigns
hawking certain brands of wines, hot dogs, and
correspondence courses. A bootleg of the recording
session for one of his later commercials still
circulates on the Internet and elsewhere, often
known simply as Frozen Peas. In the recording,
Welles can be heard brazenly chastising the
commercial's producers for its poor script and
their "impossible, meaningless" directions, before
walking out on the session, telling them that "no
money is worth this." Another bootlegged recording
features a clearly inebriated Welles struggling,
and failing, to get through his lines in a
commercial for a California champagne.

Welles died of a heart attack in Hollywood,
California at age 70 on October 10, 1985 (the same
day as Yul Brynner). The final role Welles
performed was that of Unicron in the box-office
bomb, Transformers: The Movie, recording his lines
mere weeks before his passing. However, it was not
his last appearance on the screen, as the
previously-filmed 1987 in film|1987 independent
movie Someone To Love, was released two years
following his death. His last TV appearance was in
the introduction of the episode "The Dream
Sequence Always Rings Twice" of the series
Moonlighting (TV series)|Moonlighting. Welles also
recorded a narration for the 1987 re-release of
The Alan Parsons Project|The Alan Parsons
Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination shortly
before his death. 

Wells' ashes were placed at the estate of a friend
in Ronda, Spain, at his request. Some reports
mention that some of his ashes may have been
scattered in the town's famous Plaza de Toros, the
oldest bullfighting ring in Spain that is still
used.

==Trivia==

Orson Welles' distinctive voice was used in Warner
Brothers animated cartoon "Pinky and The Brain",
with Maurice LaMarche providing the voice of The
Brain with a dead-on impersonation of Welles.

Initally George Lucas wanted to use Orson Welles'
voice for Darth Vader in Star Wars. However, he
decided that Welles' voice is too well known.
After all, Welles was hired to read the text for
the first trailer of the movie.

Welles also narrated pieces for the Odinist heavy
metal band Manowar (band)|Manowar, on their Battle
Hymns (1982) and Fighting The World (1987) albums,
the latter released two years after Welles' death.

==Selected Filmography==
Directed by Welles
*Citizen Kane (1941) - won Academy Award|Oscar for
Best Writing, Original Screenplay; nominated for
Best Actor, Best Picture and Best Director.
*The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) - nominated for
Oscar for Best Picture; famously shortened and
recut against Welles's wishes
*The Stranger (1946 movie)|The Stranger (1946)
*The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
*Macbeth (1948)|Macbeth (1948)
*Othello (1952)|Othello (1952) - winner of the
Palme d'Or, 1952 Cannes Film Festival
*Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report) (1955)
*Touch of Evil (1958)
*The Trial (1962)
*Chimes at Midnight (1965)
*The Immortal Story (1968)
*F for Fake (aka Vérités et mensonges) (1976)

Other notable films
*Hearts of Age (1934) - Welles' first foray into
film, a silent, one-reel piece he made at age 18
*Journey Into Fear (1943) - actor, co-director
with Norman Foster (director)|Norman Foster
*Jane Eyre (1944) - actor
*The Third Man (1949) actor, dialogue
*Moby Dick (movie)|Moby Dick (1956) - actor
*A Man for All Seasons (1966) - actor
*Don Quixote#Films_and_Iconography|Don Quixote
(1969, released 1992) - writer, director, actor
*The Other Side of the Wind (1970-76, unreleased)
- writer, director
*Transformers: The Movie (1986) - voice actor

==Further Reading==
*Cowie, Peter.  The Cinema of Orson Welles, Da
Capo Press, 1973.
* Mac Liammóir, Micháel. Put Money in Thy Purse:
The Filming of Orson Welles' Othello, Methuen,
1976.
* McBride, Joseph. Orson Welles, Da Capo Press,
1996. 
* Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson
Welles, Southern Methodist University Press, 1989.
* Naremore, James. Citizen Kane: A Casebook,
Oxford University Press, 2004.
* Welles, Orson et al. This is Orson Welles, Da
Capo Press, 1998.

==External links==

*imdb name|id=0000080|name=Orson Welles
*http://www.mercurytheatre.info/ Mercury Theatre
on the Air website provides MP3 and Real Audio
files of Welles' radio dramas
*http://wellesnet.com/ Wellesnet The Orson Welles
Web Resource
*http://ambersons.com/ The Magnificent Ambersons a
site that details the strange saga of Welles'
second film
*http://www.geocities.com/orsonwelleslives/ The
Unseen Welles a guide to Welles' unfinished and
unreleased projects
*http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/guides/welles/or
sonwelles.html The Orson Welles collection at the
Lilly Library
*
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/0
3/welles.html Senses of Cinema: Great Directors
Critical Database









 

	Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October
10, 1985) is generally considered one of
Hollywood's greatest film director|directors, as
well as a fine actor, broadcaster and
screenwriter. His first feature film, Citizen Kane
(1941), is universally acknowledged as an
important step in the history of cinema and widely
cited by critics as among Movies that have been
considered the greatest ever|the best films ever
made.

==Early career==
Welles was born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  He
had an unusual childhood, being somewhat of a
prodigy, and his personal relationships suffered
as a result. His mother died when he was nine, and
his father, Richard Head Welles, receded into the
past, a drunkard. 

Welles made his first plays while at the Todd
School and was brought under the guidance of the
principal, Roger Hill, who became a surrogate
father to Welles. The sometimes seen work Hearts
of Age was made there while he was a student and
also stars his first wife, Virginia Nicholson. He
later made his stage debut at the famous Gate
Theatre in Dublin, Ireland in 1931 when he talked
himself onto the stage and appeared in small
supporting roles, and by 1934 was a radio
director/actor in the United States, working with
some of the  cast that later became the Mercury
Theatre.  In that year, he married the actress and
socialite Virginia Nicholson.  Welles drew a great
deal of attention in 1937 with a production of
William Shakespeare|Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
(play)|Julius Caesar set in Fascism|Fascist Italy
and a voodoo-themed version of Macbeth featuring a
primarily African American cast. Shortly
afterward, he and producer John Houseman founded
the Mercury Theatre company.



Welles began playing The Shadow in late 1937; his
deep voice suited the role well. In the summer of
1938, Welles and the Mercury Theatre began weekly
broadcasts of short radio plays based on classic
or popular literary works.  Their October 30
broadcast of that year was an adaptation of The
War of the Worlds (radio)|The War of the Worlds. 
This brought Welles his first public notoriety on
a national level—the program created panic
among some listeners who found it completely
convincing.  Welles's adaptation of H. G. Wells's
classic novel simulated a news broadcast, cutting
into a routine dance music program to describe the
landing of Mars (planet)|Martian spacecraft in
Grovers Mill, New Jersey.  The innovative
broadcast was realistic enough to frighten many in
the audience into believing that an actual Martian
invasion was in progress. Recordings of the
broadcast are still available (see old-time radio
and also the UK Region 2 DVD of Citizen Kane). The
publicity that resulted from this led to the offer
of a three-picture Hollywood contract from RKO.

==Welles in Hollywood==

Welles toyed with various ideas for his first
project for RKO, settling briefly on an adaptation
of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness before
ultimately rejecting it. RKOs budget projections
made it impractical. In a display of his avant
garde sensibility, Welles planned to film the
action entirely from the protagonist's point of
view.  With his initial ideas bearing no fruit,
Welles finally found a suitable project in an idea
suggested by screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. 
Initially called American, it would eventually
become Welles' first feature film, Citizen Kane
(1941 in film|1941).

Welles was once again the centre of controversy
with Citizen Kane.  The gossip writer Louella
Parsons convinced the yellow
journalism|yellow-press magnate, William Randolph
Hearst, that he was the basis for Charles Foster
Kane|Kane, with the result that Hearst's media
empire boycotted the film. On its release, this
event overshadowed the film's radical formal
innovations. Welles is said to have sardonically
remarked, concerning Hearst's attitude, that if he
were to do a movie about the journalism magnate,
the fact would be more grand and shockingly
unbelievable than the fiction. This possibly
apocryphal quote is uttered by Liev Schreiber (as
Welles) in the 1999 TV movie RKO 281.  

Welles' second film for RKO was the more
traditional The Magnificent Ambersons, adapted
from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth
Tarkington, and on which RKO executives hoped to
make back the money lost by Citizen
Kane's relative commercial
failure. 

Simultaneously, Welles worked with his Mercury
Theatre fellows on a spy thriller, Journey Into
Fear, which he co-wrote with Joseph Cotten. In
addition to acting in the film, Welles was also a
producer.  Direction was credited solely to Norman
Foster (director)|Norman Foster, but the film
contains several Expressionism (film)|
expressionistic sequences indicating input by
Welles.  Welles denied having directed the film,
but the visual style is very similar to his
credited works.  Whatever the case, Welles played
a major role in its production, but he expressed
disappointment at the finished product. 

During the production of Amberson's, Welles was
asked to make a documentary film about South
America on behalf of the U. S. Government. Welles
left the United States to begin shooting this
documentary after putting together the first rough
cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, on the
understanding that further editing decisions would
be carried out via telegram. At this point RKO, in
a perilous financial situation and fearing another
commercial failure, wrested control of the film
from Welles' Mercury Productions staff, cut over
fifty minutes of footage, and added a reshot,
upbeat ending: the cut footage, including Welles's
original ending to the film, has been lost,
apparently permanently. This event marked the
beginning of a recurring pattern in Welles'
Hollywood career of damaging executive
interference.  Ironically, Welles' South American
documentary, entitled It's All True, never saw
completion in Welles' lifetime. The surviving
footage was released in 1993.

In 1946, International Pictures released The
Stranger (1946 movie)|The Stranger, starring
Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young as well as
Welles himself.  Sam Spiegel produced the film,
which gave Welles an opportunity to
salvage—briefly—his reputation in Hollywood. 
A Film noir|noir-ish suspense film about the hunt
for a Nazi war criminal, The Stranger was Welles'
only commercial success as a director.  Welles
supposedly made the film to prove that he could
make a conventional picture within time and budget
constraints.  He followed The Stranger with
another noir drama for Columbia Pictures, The Lady
from Shanghai. Welles played the protagonist,
while his second wife, Rita Hayworth, played one
of the villains.  Hayworth said of Orson Welles,
"...a most brilliant auteur and lover.  I just
wish he hadn't become so fat.  It affected his
performance in movies and the bedroom."  Like The
Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai
suffered heavy editing by its studio, with
approximately an hour removed from Welles' final
cut.  The excised portions are believed to be lost
permanently.  Welles' notes for the film suggest
that these portions would have aided audiences'
comprehension of the story.  Despite the editing,
the theatrical cut still contains many examples of
Welles' Expressionist film-making.  Once released,
the film was savaged by critics for its convoluted
plot, and audiences disliked Hayworth as a
villain.  Welles' marriage to Hayworth—already
troubled during filming—ended shortly after the
production wrapped.

Welles changed studios once again, moving to
Republic Pictures, a studio with a reputation for
making B-movie|B movies.  The move marked a return
to Shakespeare for Welles—he chose to direct and
star in an idiosyncratic production of Macbeth
(1948)|Macbeth. Working with a very limited
budget, Welles fashioned a Macbeth that emphasized
the darkness of the play's themes and characters. 
Unfortunately for Welles, the finished film once
again proved unpalatable to the movie-going
public.

==Welles after Hollywood==

Frustrated by his experience with the studio
system, Welles left Hollywood in 1948. The
following year, he made a notable appearance in
front of the camera. In Graham Greene's The Third
Man, Welles (as Harry Lime) gave the infamous
"Cuckoo Clock" speech. 'In Italy for 30 years
under the Borgias they had warfare, terror,
murder, and bloodshed, but they produced
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly
love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace,
and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.' 
This is the only piece of dialogue in the film
which Greene himself did not write: Welles penned
it himself and insisted that it be put in. Greene
is reputed to have hated it (possibly because the
cuckoo clock was not, in fact, a Swiss invention).

From 1949 to 1952, Welles made a remarkable
Othello, filming the entire work on location in
Europe and Morocco. The film was not well
received, partly because the dubbing after the
fact was very poor. In 1992, this film was
restored from a nitrate negative that had been
feared lost. The entire score was rerecorded, and
the result is a powerful rendition that belies the
usual view that Welles had lost his touch. He made
a virtue of the choppiness due to having no chance
to fill holes in the studio after filming on
location. The cinemetography is remarkable, and
the entire effect gripping.

Barring a brief return in 1958 in film|1958 to
make Touch of Evil (which was also butchered by
the studio, but has since been restored to
something close to Welles' vision), the rest of
Welles' directorial career was spent in Europe,
his films self-financed with acting fees or,
later, funded by sympathetic producers. On almost
all of these projects he retained final cut, but
the independence thus gained also resulted in
drastically reduced budgets and technical
facilities. Despite such setbacks, some of Welles'
best work was produced during this period. He was
an aficionado of stage magic and often appeared at
Hollywood's Magic Castle. He even did TV,
performing a few tricks with Lucille Ball as his
assistant in an episode of I Love Lucy. In his
later years, when his weight had ballooned, he
appeared in a sketch on Johnny Carson's show,
playing an extremely heavy and tyrannical king not
unlike Henry VIII of England|Henry VIII. 

Welles starred in many of his films and wrote the
scripts, often using the talents of the Mercury
Theatre.  These included several stories from
English literature, such as Macbeth (1948 in
film|1948), Jane Eyre (which he produced
uncredited, and in which he appeared opposite Joan
Fontaine), and Chimes at Midnight (1965 in
film|1965), an underrated classic in which Welles
played Falstaff.

==Television==

A lesser known, but still important, aspect of
Welles' career was his work in television. The
Orson Welles Sketchbook (1955) was created for the
BBC and featured Welles telling stories and
drawing pictures to illustrate them. The director
also created Around the World with Orson Welles
(1955) for the BBC. In this series he gleefully
experimented with a film-essay format,
foreshadowing the later F for Fake (1974). The
Fountain of Youth (1958) was made for American TV
and in it Welles offers some possibilities for
expanding the medium's vocabulary.  The Immortal
Story (1968) was filmed for French television and
stars not only Welles himself, but also Jeanne
Moreau, one of the most loved actresses of the
French New Wave cinema; based on a short story by
Isak Dinesen, it is a spare and somber meditation
on old age, isolation, and the inability to
create. One of his most playful efforts was
Portrait of Gina (1958), in which the
director/narrator wanders through Italy, finally
arriving at Gina Lollobrigida's home at the end of
the film.  Welles continued to work in TV through
the 60s, 70s and 80s, but little of the work he
directed from this period was ever broadcast. A
version of The Merchant of Venice (1969) was not
completed because a reel was stolen and never
recovered. Clips from unfinished TV projects
appear in the documentary Orson Welles: The
One-Man Band (1995), a fascinating but bittersweet
look at many of the director's varied efforts,

==Unfinished projects==

Welles' exile from Hollywood and reliance on
independent finance meant that many of his later
cinema projects were filmed in a piecemeal fashion
and some were not completed at all. In the mid
1950s Welles worked on a film adaptation of Miguel
de Cervantes|Cervantes' Don Quixote, initially on
a commission from CBS television.  CBS were
unhappy with the original half hour television
play and rejected the footage.  Welles gleefully
took this as an opportunity to expand the film to
feature length, developing the screenplay to take
Quixote and Sancho Panza into the modern age (an
idea that later formed the basis of Jean-Marie
Poiré|Jean-Marie Poiré's Les Visiteurs). 
Filming continued in a fragmentary fashion for a
number of years whenever cast and crew could be
assembled in one place.  The project was finally
abandoned with the death of Francisco Reiguera,
the actor playing Quixote, in 1969.  An incomplete
version of the film was released in 1992.

In 1970 Welles began shooting The Other Side of
the Wind.  Finance was from a number of sources,
the largest of which being an Iranian company
based in Paris and run by the brother in law of
the Shah of Iran.  The film is apparently the
story of the efforts of a film director (played by
John Huston) to complete his last Hollywood movie
and is largely set at a lavish party.  Although in
1972 the film was reported by Welles as being "96%
complete" its legal ownership became a matter of
dispute.  Argument continued for a number of years
until the 1979 Iranian Revolution effectively
consigned it to a legal limbo.  The negative
remained in a Paris vault until in 2004 Welles's
friend Peter Bogdanovich (who also acted in the
film) announced his intention to resolve the legal
difficulties and complete the production.

Another unfinished project was The Big Brass Ring,
the script of which was adapted and filmed by
US-director George Hickenlooper in 1999.

Mark Millar wrote an article about a failed Orson
Welles Batman project.  This generated a
considerable amount of buzz, especially on Ain't
It Cool News, but the rumor has since been proven
false.

==Final years==

During his career he won one Academy Award|Oscar
and was nominated for a further four.  One of his
last notable film appearances was as Cardinal
Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons (1966 in
film|1966). In 1971 in film|1971 the Academy gave
him an Honorary award "For superlative artistry
and versatility in the creation of motion
pictures".

Overweight for decades, he became profoundly
obesity|obese in his later years.  He capitalized
on his image in various advertising campaigns
hawking certain brands of wines, hot dogs, and
correspondence courses. A bootleg of the recording
session for one of his later commercials still
circulates on the Internet and elsewhere, often
known simply as Frozen Peas. In the recording,
Welles can be heard brazenly chastising the
commercial's producers for its poor script and
their "impossible, meaningless" directions, before
walking out on the session, telling them that "no
money is worth this." Another bootlegged recording
features a clearly inebriated Welles struggling,
and failing, to get through his lines in a
commercial for a California champagne.

Welles died of a heart attack in Hollywood,
California at age 70 on October 10, 1985 (the same
day as Yul Brynner). The final role Welles
performed was that of the planet-eater Unicron in
the animated Transformers: The Movie, recording
his lines mere weeks before his passing. However,
it was not his last appearance on the screen, as
the previously-filmed 1987 in film|1987
independent movie Someone To Love, was released
two years following his death. His last TV
appearance was in the introduction of the episode
"The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" of the
series Moonlighting (TV series)|Moonlighting.
Welles also recorded a narration for the 1987
re-release of The Alan Parsons Project|The Alan
Parsons Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination
shortly before his death. 

Wells' ashes were placed at the estate of a friend
in Ronda, Spain, at his request. Some reports
mention that some of his ashes may have been
scattered in the town's famous Plaza de Toros, the
oldest bullfighting ring in Spain that is still
used.

==Trivia==

Orson Welles' distinctive voice was used in Warner
Brothers animated cartoon "Pinky and The Brain",
with Maurice LaMarche providing the voice of The
Brain with a dead-on impersonation of Welles.

Initially George Lucas wanted to use Orson Welles'
voice for Darth Vader in Star Wars. However, he
decided that Welles' voice is too well known.
After all, Welles was hired to read the text for
the first trailer of the movie.

Welles also narrated pieces for the Odinist heavy
metal band Manowar (band)|Manowar, on their Battle
Hymns (1982) and Fighting The World (1987) albums,
the latter released two years after Welles' death.

==Selected Filmography==
Directed by Welles
*Citizen Kane (1941) - won Academy Award|Oscar for
Best Writing, Original Screenplay; nominated for
Best Actor, Best Picture and Best Director.
*The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) - nominated for
Oscar for Best Picture; famously shortened and
recut against Welles's wishes
*The Stranger (1946 movie)|The Stranger (1946)
*The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
*Macbeth (1948)|Macbeth (1948)
*Othello (1952)|Othello (1952) - winner of the
Palme d'Or, 1952 Cannes Film Festival
*Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report) (1955)
*Touch of Evil (1958)
*The Trial (1962)
*Chimes at Midnight (1965)
*The Immortal Story (1968)
*F for Fake (aka Vérités et mensonges) (1974)

Other notable films
*Hearts of Age (1934) - Welles' first foray into
film, a silent, one-reel piece he made at age 18
*Journey Into Fear (1943) - actor, co-director
with Norman Foster (director)|Norman Foster
*Jane Eyre (1944) - actor
*The Third Man (1949) actor, dialogue
*Moby Dick (movie)|Moby Dick (1956) - actor
*A Man for All Seasons (1966) - actor
*Don Quixote#Films_and_Iconography|Don Quixote
(1969, released 1992) - writer, director, actor
*The Other Side of the Wind (1970-76, unreleased)
- writer, director
*Transformers: The Movie (1986) - voice actor

==Further Reading==
*Cowie, Peter.  The Cinema of Orson Welles, Da
Capo Press, 1973.
* Mac Liammóir, Micháel. Put Money in Thy Purse:
The Filming of Orson Welles' Othello, Methuen,
1976.
* McBride, Joseph. Orson Welles, Da Capo Press,
1996. 
* Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson
Welles, Southern Methodist University Press, 1989.
* Naremore, James. Citizen Kane: A Casebook,
Oxford University Press, 2004.
* Welles, Orson et al. This is Orson Welles, Da
Capo Press, 1998.

==External links==

*imdb name|id=0000080|name=Orson Welles
*http://www.mercurytheatre.info/ Mercury Theatre
on the Air website provides MP3 and Real Audio
files of Welles' radio dramas
*http://wellesnet.com/ Wellesnet The Orson Welles
Web Resource
*http://ambersons.com/ The Magnificent Ambersons a
site that details the strange saga of Welles'
second film
*http://www.geocities.com/orsonwelleslives/ The
Unseen Welles a guide to Welles' unfinished and
unreleased projects
*http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/guides/welles/or
sonwelles.html The Orson Welles collection at the
Lilly Library
*
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/0
3/welles.html Senses of Cinema: Great Directors
Critical Database