Who Was the Real Orson Welles?

A very young Orson Welles.

(National Archives)

The director found dead at his typewriter 20 years ago today had never made a hit film. Most of his movies had failed even to recoup their production costs on initial release. He had spent the last ten years of his life appearing in commercials and television shows, and his final paycheck was for recording a voice in The Transformers: The Movie. But the day after his death, laudatory obituaries ran on the front page of both The New York Times and the Washington Post. For Orson Welles, man of extremes, it was par for the course. A household name by age 23 who then revolutionized filmmaking with his directorial debut, five years later he was Hollywood persona non grata. The unfulfilled genius, the liberal whose most memorable portrayals were of overstuffed aristocrats, the bombastic who decried the press for comparing his life and his roles but who acted in all but one of his films, he rarely ever inspired a unified reaction or escaped controversy. He is considered both one of the great geniuses and one of the great failures of American film. What was he?

Welles was born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and almost immediately showed astonishing precocity, reading Shakespeare at three and writing plays at four. He developed his talent at the Todd School for Boys, in Woodstock, Illinois, staging 30 productions before graduating at 16. Despite his teachers’ plans to send him to Harvard, he headed to Ireland to paint. He quickly ran out of money there, so he convinced the manager of a Dublin theater that he was a Broadway star and landed a spot in the troupe, where he worked for a year.

After jaunts to Spain and Morocco, he returned to America in 1933 to launch his theater career in this country. He directed his first professional production, a Haiti-set, all-black “voodoo” MacBeth for the Federal Theatre Project, in 1936. It was a smash hit and led to his directing several more successful plays, but his stint with the Federal Theatre Project ended a year later in a spectacular fashion typical for the flamboyant iconoclast. He had chosen to stage the socialist light opera The Cradle Will Rock, but budget cuts and politics led the WPA to shut it down. Welles moved the production to a rented theater, where the actors performed from their seats in the audience to avoid being fired by the WPA. Two months later he formed his own theater company with the producer John Houseman.

It was with the new company, the Mercury Theatre, that he would orchestrate one of the most famous media events of all time. In addition to directing the company’s productions, including a Julius Caesar set in fascist Italy, he moonlighted as a radio actor. In July 1938 he persuaded CBS to give the Mercury its own Sunday night show. The Mercury Theatre on the Air adapted several works for radio, including, on October 30, 1938, H. G. Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds.

The nationwide panic the broadcast aroused when listeners believed Martians had landed in New Jersey made the 23-year-old Welles famous literally overnight and drew Hollywood to his door. The movie studio RKO offered him an unprecedented contract: a two-picture deal for $225,000 plus 25 percent of the profits, and he would be free of any studio interference on the set. Welles took the job largely because the Mercury, hemorrhaging from an over-lavish Shakespeare production, needed the money. But by the time he moved west, in June 1939, resentment against the new wunderkind was already simmering among directors who had toiled for years for the kind of creative control he’d been immediately handed.

Brash and overconfident though he was, he did his homework: As the first major director to come of age during the movie era, he was able to study the work of the great filmmakers before him. His first effort, Citizen Kane, would, in the words of the director François Truffaut, “sum up everything that had come before in cinema, and would prefigure everything to come.” To tell the innovative, non-linear story of the fictional newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, Welles combined the visual techniques of German silent movies with a complex, timeline-blurring soundtrack, a skill from his radio days. Critics loved the film, but it lost $150,000 on its initial release in 1941, largely thanks to the efforts of William Randolph Hearst. Insulted by the similarities between himself and Kane, as played by Welles, Hearst campaigned against the movie, and few theaters ended up showing it.

Citizen Kane established themes that would pervade the rest of Welles’s work: an egotistical central character, loss of innocence, inescapable fate, preoccupation with death, and the corruption and loneliness that often accompany power. It was also the last of his films to be released as he envisioned it. Two weeks after shooting ended on his second movie, The Magnificent Ambersons, he went to Brazil to make a documentary, and in his absence RKO cut nearly an hour of the film’s running time and tacked on a happy ending. The Magnificent Ambersons foundered in theaters, and Welles was fired from RKO in 1942. Branded difficult and wasteful, he didn’t direct another movie until The Stranger in 1946, which he made to prove he could work within time and budget constraints. He deemed it “the worst of my films,” but it was the only one to turn a profit on its initial release. When Columbia Pictures repeatedly re-edited his noir thriller The Lady From Shanghai and didn’t release it until 18 months after its completion, he fled to Europe in disgust.

Divorced from both sufficient funding and the technical expertise of Hollywood, Welles, at only 32, sank into a pattern that would last the rest of his life: taking movie roles and endorsements to fund his directorial ventures and shooting using borrowed equipment and whatever backing he could scrape together. He filmed his Othello over three years between acting jobs, and he embarked on many other projects, including Don Quixote, King Lear, and the movie-industry indictment The Other Side of the Wind, that were never released because he couldn’t find enough money or a distributor. His films from this period betray their low budgets and haphazard shooting schedules, although Welles’s genius at setting and blocking a scene shines through the poor lighting and muddy sound.

While most of Hollywood felt gratified to see him brought low, some still admired him. (“People should cross themselves when they say his name,” Marlene Dietrich once said.) Charlton Heston persuaded him to return to Hollywood in 1956 to direct what would be his last American movie, Touch of Evil. The story of a cop (Welles) and a Mexican narcotics investigator (Heston) saw Welles back on top of his game. The opening three-minute single-take shot remains a classic, although the producer marred the effect by running credits over it. In spite of additional scenes the studio inserted, the film ranks among Welles’s finest. But contemporary reviewers, contemptuous of his self-exile, disagreed, and the movie flopped.

He returned to Europe in 1959 to continue acting and directing. He won an honorary Oscar in 1970 for “superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures,” yet no one in the Academy proved willing to fund one of his motion pictures. After 1974’s F Is for Fake, a documentary on art forgery, he never completed another picture, although he certainly tried. When his chauffeur discovered his dead body on October 10, 1985, he was bent over his typewriter. He had suffered a heart attack while working on the last in a long line of scripts.

“I started at the top and worked down,” he once remarked. That’s a justifiable opinion for the director of what is often called the best film ever made, yet who lived out his last years hawking correspondence courses. Welles’s downfall was magnified when his rivals pounced on every aspect of his work after Citizen Kane that was less than a paragon of cinematic history. His failure to live up to his potential was of course partly his own fault. He was the proverbial genius too far ahead of his time to be popular, pushing the medium beyond what audiences wanted and choosing impractical projects that shrewder directors would know could never get released. But the studios share the blame. It’s no surprise that Welles’s best movie is also the only well funded one that no one else tampered with.

By the time of his death, at 70, Welles was already a legend, and the distance of time has made his visionary talents even clearer. His career bestrode three separate media-stage, radio, and film-and he broke barriers in each. He made how a story is told, not just the story itself, important. As his influence continues to unspool on screen-he inspired filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick to Francis Ford Coppola and Kenneth Branagh, and even the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez admits that Welles prompted his plotting-perhaps posterity will show Welles more generosity than he knew in life.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.