Welles's astonishing career began early: his 1938 radio adaptation of 'The War of the Worlds' panicked listeners nationwide, and at just 25 he directed, co-wrote, produced, and starred in 'Citizen Kane,' widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. His restless genius and battles with studios defined a turbulent, singular Hollywood life.
George Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to a well-off but unstable family; his mother, a concert pianist, died when he was nine, and his inventor father died six years later. Precocious to an almost unsettling degree, Welles was directing and acting in Shakespeare productions as a teenager and had established himself on Broadway and in radio by his early twenties.
In 1938, his Mercury Theatre broadcast of H.G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds," staged as a series of fake news bulletins about a Martian invasion, caused genuine panic among listeners who tuned in without hearing the introduction. The stunt made him a household name and a target of fascination for Hollywood. RKO Pictures gave the 24-year-old an unprecedented contract granting him nearly total creative control.
The result, 1941's "Citizen Kane," which Welles co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in, pioneered deep-focus cinematography and nonlinear narrative and is routinely ranked among the greatest films ever made. Yet its thinly veiled portrait of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst provoked a career-long backlash. Welles spent his remaining decades fighting studios for creative control, producing brilliant, uneven work while becoming a symbol of Hollywood's tension between art and commerce.
Key people: Orson Welles