Both men coincidentally made their spectacular debut as directors in Welles with Citizen Kane and Huston with The Maltese Falcon Both would eventually be directed by the other: Welles' had a cameo in Huston's adaptation of Moby Dick and Huston played the lead in Welles' unfinished The Other Side of the Wind He remained good friends with Joseph Cotten until the end of his life, despite a working relationship that was often considered demanding of the older Cotten.
George, his given name, was in honor of his father's friend, humorist George Ade. Film critics lobbied for him to record an audio commentary for Citizen Kane , but he refused, stating that he was tired of talking about this. Durham, who went by the stage name La Garbo, was a popular dancer in the s and s on the West Coast. Once referred to the audience as "the big, many-headed beast crouching out there in the darkness". Became a father for the first time at age 22 when his first wife Virginia Nicolson gave birth to their daughter Christopher Welles on March 27, Became a father for the second time at age 25 when his married lover Geraldine Fitzgerald gave birth to their son Michael Lindsay-Hogg on June 5, Became a father for the third time at age 29 when his second wife Rita Hayworth gave birth to their daughter Rebecca Welles on December 17, Became a father for the fourth time at age 40 when his third wife Paola Mori gave birth to their daughter Beatrice Welles on November 13, The Last Picture Show was filmed in black and white because of Welles' famous remark to Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt , when director and crew were uncertain on how to film the locations without using too many colors.
Welles, who was on the set, replied: "Of course you'll film it in black and white! His full name is George Orson Welles.
He was named "George" in honor of writer George Ade , who was friends with the family. His middle name was in honor of another family friend, a man named Orson Wells without the "e". Has been played by Steven Lamprinos in Hollywood Mouth 2 The director of that film, Jordan Mohr , wanted an Orson Welles character in the movie because she is from Venice, California, where Touch of Evil was filmed. Carmel after he died for the third season of the animated series The Transformers He died in the middle of typing notes for a shooting session with his cameraman, Gary Graver , scheduled for the following day.
He was the youngest person ever nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards at the age of twenty-six. He held the title for fifty years until John Singleton was nominated for Boyz n the Hood at the age of twenty-four. He was the youngest person ever to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the age of twenty-six.
He held the title for fifty-seven years when he was surpassed by Ben Affleck who won the award for Good Will Hunting at the age of twenty-five. No evidence the film was ever made or released. As a child, Welles developed a talent for playing the piano. When his mother passed away when young Welles was aged 8, he never again played the piano before his dying day. For his book which would be named "This is Orson Welles", Peter Bogdanovich first met Welles in so as to record their various conversations about film, Welles' career, the theatre and other subjects.
Unfortunately, the two men had a falling out with each other by the very early s and weren't able to make amends. However, Bogdanovich had plenty of material for his eventual book. Tended to use some of his actors from the "Mercury Theatre" company for some of his films.
These included Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane. Beginning with his days as an actor and writer for radio, Welles was referred to as "the Boy Wonder". He soon began to grow tired of this nickname. In spite of being a highly regarded artist of cinema, Welles only had one box office hit during his lifetime with The Stranger Most of his films were box office failures upon release. Didn't particularly care for the working methods used by fellow director Sir Alfred Hitchcock , although Welles admitted he enjoyed some of Hitchcock's early movies.
A father to three daughters, Welles wasn't very close to either one of them. In later years, he did establish more regular contact with his youngest child. Was busy filming a documentary in South America when his movie The Magnificent Ambersons had entered post-production. RKO Studios proceeded to re-edit the film until this became almost incomprehensible.
Upon his return to Hollywood, Welles salvaged what he could before the film went on general release. The film was deleted by a third while he was shooting his documentary in Brazil which was later abandoned. A lifelong and professional level magician, Welles had a magic show scheduled with legendary British magician David Berglas.
However, he died a few weeks before production began. In an interview with Sir Michael Parkinson , he praised James Cagney as "maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera".
One day, Henry Jaglom was discussing with Welles how devastated he had been when the critics annihilated his directorial debut, "A Safe Place" , in which Welles had appeared. Welles ever so cleverly responded, "Well, at least with you starting at the bottom, you have no place to go but up. With my first film being "Citizen Kane" , I had no where to go but down!
Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit. I'm not bitter about Hollywood's treatment of me, but over its treatment of D. I hate it but I just don't allow myself to face the fact that I hold it in contempt because it keeps on turning out to be the only place to go. I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.
And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys. I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost.
There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.
For thirty years, people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else.
We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them. My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people. I think I'm I made essentially a mistake staying in movies, because I Stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written--anything.
I've wasted the greater part of my life looking for money, and trying to get along And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It's no way to spend a life. I think it is always a tremendously good formula in any art form to admit the limitations of the form.
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theater, you expect me to tell you the truth about something.
These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai. The word "genius" was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age.
I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. I'm not rich. Never have been. When you see me in a bad movie as an actor I hope not as a director , it is because a good movie has not been offered to me. I often make bad films in order to live. Everybody denies that I am genius - but nobody ever called me one. His mother was the former Beatrice Ives, who died when Welles was 8 years old. As a child, at the age when most youngsters are just beginning to read, Welles showed a remarkable flair for almost all of the arts--he wrote poetry, painted, acted, played the piano and staged his own productions of Shakespeare.
Welles was raised in Chicago and was educated largely at home until his 11th year, when he entered the private Todd School in Woodstock, Ill. His father died a year later and Welles became the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician. He graduated from Todd in , decided against college, and set out on a sketching tour of Ireland.
Handsome and already the possessor of a sonorous, naturally dramatic speaking voice, Welles talked his way into a job with an Irish theatrical company, claiming he had starred in New York productions. He returned to the United States in , tried out for several Broadway roles and resumed his travels when he was turned down.
At about the same time, the young actor met Houseman, then directing the Phoenix Theatre Group. With Houseman, he formed the Mercury Theatre Project in The next year, the troupe evolved into the highly experimental Mercury Theatre of the Air, a weekly radio anthology. It's now considered one of the greatest films ever made. Welles' second film for RKO, The Magnificent Ambersons , was a far more straightforward project and one that helped send Welles running from Hollywood.
Toward the end of its filming, Welles made a quick trip to Rio de Janeiro to do a documentary. When he returned he discovered that RKO had made its own edit of the film's ending. Welles, who disowned the movie, raged. A bitter public relations spat between the filmmaker and RKO ensued, and Welles, successfully cast by RKO as difficult to work with and with no appreciation for budgets, never truly recovered. For several years Welles stuck around Hollywood.
He married "love goddess" Rita Hayworth in , and starred in an adaptation of Jane Eyre that debuted in the United States the following February. Welles then directed The Stranger and Macbeth , but he wasn't long for California; the same year he made Macbeth , he divorced Hayworth and began what amounted to a year self-imposed exile from Hollywood. He later appeared in films like The Third Man and directed other projects, including Othello and Mr.
Arkadin He returned to Hollywood in to direct Touch of Evil , which registered low box-office numbers and took a further hit with an adaptation of Franz Kafka 's The Trial Hard times plagued Welles throughout much of the s. Health issues dominated his life, many of them brought on by his growing obesity -- the filmmaker topped pounds at one point.
The last decade of his life saw Welles continuing to stay busy. Among his many projects, he served as the spokesman for Paul Masson wine, appeared on the TV series Moonlighting and made a documentary called Filming Othello , about the making of his film. Toward the end of his life, Welles and Hollywood seemed to have made up. Griffith Award, the organization's highest honor. The comfortable family life in which Orson was born gradually fell apart.
Orson lived with his mother for the next few years and was deeply involved with her artistic lifestyle. Upon her death, his father resumed the task of continuing the eight-year-old Orson's education. An important early influence on his life was Maurice Bernstein, an orthopedist who would eventually be his guardian after his father's suicide in Upon Dr. Bernstein's suggestion, young Orson was enrolled in the progressive Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois.
There, Orson was first introduced to theater and learned a great deal about production and direction. His formal education ended with graduation in After a short stay in Ireland, where Welles was involved in the theater as an actor, he returned to Chicago where he briefly served as a drama coach at the Todd School and coedited four volumes of plays by William Shakespeare — He made his Broadway debut with Katharine Cornell's company in December He and John Houseman — joined forces the next year to manage a unit of the Federal Theatre Project, one of the work-relief arts projects established by the New Deal, a major nationwide social program intended to spark economic recovery during the s.
Welles's direction was inspired, injecting new life into various classics, including an all-African American Macbeth, the French farce humorous ridicule The Italian Straw Hat, and the morality having to do with right and wrong play Dr.
They organized the Mercury Theatre, which over the next two seasons had a number of extraordinary successes, including a modern dress Julius Caesar with Welles playing Brutus , an Elizabethan working-class comedy Shoemaker's Holiday rewritten by Welles , and George Bernard Shaw's — Heartbreak House with the twenty-four-year-old Welles convincingly playing an elderly man.
Welles also found time to play "The Shadow" on radio and to supervise a "Mercury Theatre on the Air," whose most notorious success was an adaptation of H. Wells's — War of the Worlds, which resulted in panic as many listeners believed that Martians were invading New Jersey.
In the Mercury Theatre collapsed as a result of economic problems and Welles went to Hollywood, California, to find the cash to resurrect it. Following an early flirtation with movies and after casting around some months for a subject, Welles filmed Citizen Kane in Orson Welles. Since its release in this film has generally been praised as one of the best movies of all time.
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