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Welles's directorial film debut Citizen Kane (1941), in which he also starred as Charles Foster Kane, garnered him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and nominations for Best Actor and Best Director.
At age 21, Welles was directing high-profile stage productions for the Federal Theatre Project in New York City—starting with a celebrated 1936 adaptation of Macbeth with an African-American cast, and ending with the controversial labor opera The Cradle Will Rock in 1937.
- Overview
- Early work
- Theatre and radio in the 1930s
Orson Welles (born May 6, 1915, Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S.—died October 10, 1985, Los Angeles, California) American motion-picture actor, director, producer, and writer. His innovative narrative techniques and use of photography, dramatic lighting, and music to further the dramatic line and to create mood made his Citizen Kane (1941)—which he wrote, directed, produced, and acted in—one of the most-influential films in the history of the art.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
Welles was born to a mother, Beatrice Ives, who was a concert pianist and a crack rifle shot, and a father, Richard Welles, who was an inventor and a businessman. Welles was a child prodigy, adept at the piano and violin, acting, drawing, painting, and writing verse; he also entertained his friends by performing magic tricks and staging mini productions of William Shakespeare’s plays.
Welles’s parents separated when he was four years old, and his mother died when he was nine. In 1926 Welles entered the exclusive Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. There his gifts found fertile ground, and he dazzled the teachers and students with stagings of both modern and classical plays. His father died in 1930, and Welles became the ward of a family friend, Chicago doctor Maurice Bernstein. In 1931 he graduated from Todd, but, instead of attending college, he studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago before traveling to Dublin, where he successfully auditioned at the Gate Theatre for the part of the Duke of Württemberg in a stage adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Jew Süss.
Britannica Quiz
Oscar-Worthy Movie Trivia
When Welles was performing in Romeo and Juliet, he met producer John Houseman, who immediately cast him as the lead in Archibald MacLeish’s verse play Panic, which premiered in 1935 for Houseman’s Phoenix Theatre Group. They then moved on in 1936 to mounting productions for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA’s) Federal Theatre Project. Their first effort, for the Federal Theatre’s Negro Division, was Macbeth, with an all African American cast and the setting changed from Scotland to Haiti. They began 1937 with Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (starring Welles). Their most (in)famous effort was Marc Blitzstein’s proletarian musical play The Cradle Will Rock. WPA guards shut down the theatre the night before its opening. (The shutdown was ostensibly for budgetary reasons; however, the political nature of the play was considered too radical.) Welles and Houseman quickly rented another theatre, and on opening night the play was presented with the actors performing their roles from seats in the audience. That same year they formed the Mercury Theatre, which presented a renowned modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In 1938 the Mercury Theatre presented William Gillette’s comedy Too Much Johnson. Welles shot three short silent films to precede each act of the play; however, the films were never finished. (The Too Much Johnson footage was believed to have been destroyed by fire in 1970; however, it was rediscovered, restored, and premiered in 2013.)
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At the same time, Welles was making inroads in radio. His radio career began early in 1934 with an excerpt from Panic. In 1935 he began appearing regularly on The March of Time news series, and subsequent radio roles included the part of Lamont Cranston in the mystery series The Shadow. In 1938 the Mercury players undertook a series of radio dramas adapted from famous novels. They attained national notoriety with a program based on H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds; the performance on October 30, using the format of a simulated news broadcast narrated by Welles, announced an attack on New Jersey by invaders from Mars. (However, contemporary reports that the program caused a nationwide panic were exaggerated.)
- Michael Barson
Apr 2, 2014 · In 1937, the 21-year-old Welles, fresh off directing an all-Black cast in a version of Macbeth, teamed up with Houseman to form the Mercury Theatre. Its first production, an adaption of Julius...
May 27, 2024 · Citizen Kane, American film drama, released in 1941, that was directed, produced, and cowritten by Orson Welles, who also starred in the lead role. A landmark work in the history of cinema, Citizen Kane is acclaimed by many critics as the greatest movie ever made.
- Lee Pfeiffer
- The plot of Citizen Kane centres on the rise and fall of publishing magnate Charles Foster Kane. Following Kane’s death at the start of the film, a...
- Based on flashbacks of discrete episodes in Kane’s life, Citizen Kane mostly takes place in three different settings: Colorado during Kane’s childh...
- The protagonist of Citizen Kane is said to have been based on real-life magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was an American newspaper publisher...
- On a technical level, Citizen Kane is important for the innovative lighting and focusing methods of its cinematographer, Gregg Toland, and the dram...
- “Rosebud” is the last word spoken by Citizen Kane’s protagonist, Charles Kane, on his deathbed at the beginning of the film. The meaning of the wor...
May 4, 2024 · Born in 1915, Welles first came to prominence as a stage director, mounting groundbreaking productions of “Macbeth,” “Dr. Faustus,” and “The Cradle Will Rock” before forming his own repertory...
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. Born May 6, 1915. Died October 10, 1985 (70) Add to list. Won 1 Oscar.
