Orson Welles
May 6, 1915 — October 10, 1985 — United States
Orson Welles was a prodigious American filmmaker, actor, and broadcaster whose debut feature Citizen Kane is regularly cited as the greatest film ever made. An enfant terrible who burned brightly and contentiously through Hollywood's studio system, he spent much of his life laboring on ambitious projects underfunded and unfinished — yet his influence on cinema has proved inexhaustible.
The Boy Genius
Born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Welles was recognized as a prodigy almost from childhood. He toured Ireland performing Shakespeare as a teenager. By his early twenties he was the enfant terrible of the New York theater world, directing a groundbreaking all-Black production of Macbeth set in Haiti and a fascist-inflected Julius Caesar. His Mercury Theatre radio programs became famous enough that when he adapted H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds on Halloween 1938 in a mock-news-broadcast format, widespread reports — later exaggerated — held that Americans fled their homes in panic believing Martians had actually landed.
Citizen Kane
RKO Pictures gave the twenty-four-year-old Welles an extraordinary contract granting almost total creative control — an extraordinary concession for any studio. He used it to make Citizen Kane (1941), a portrait of a media mogul widely identified as William Randolph Hearst, told through a non-linear structure, deep-focus photography, and low-angle shots that cinematographer Gregg Toland helped realize. The film was critically acclaimed but commercially mediocre; Hearst used his newspapers to suppress it. His follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, was cut by the studio while Welles was filming abroad. Both films are now regarded as masterpieces — the first ranked #1 on nearly every all-time list, the second a tragic case of studio interference. The films remain essential viewing for anyone serious about cinema.
Did You Know?
Orson Welles was only 25 years old when he began shooting Citizen Kane, and the film was his first feature. He had never directed a motion picture before making what critics would repeatedly call the greatest movie ever filmed.
Exile and Unfinished Works
After conflicts with studios, Welles spent much of his career in Europe, financing independent projects by acting in other people's films. He made The Third Man (as an actor), directed Othello, Touch of Evil, and the deeply personal F for Fake. Many projects — including his adaptation of Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind — were left unfinished at his death on October 10, 1985. The Other Side of the Wind was finally completed and released on Netflix in 2018, thirty-three years after he died. The trajectory of his career — brilliant debut, studio resistance, European exile, brilliant late work — became a model narrative for auteur cinema and the tension between artistic vision and commercial filmmaking.