Welles spring of talent
Most legends expand the man to fit the myth. But that's not the case with Orson Welles. As a recent film series at New York's Film Forum showed, Welles needs no exaggeration.
Film director, actor, theatre innovator, radio broadcaster, raconteur, bon viveur, magician - his tremendous successes and equally inspiring failures were so huge that there's no need of enlargement. Welles, of course, is best-known as the director of the epic Citizen Kane, the 1941 film that brought a number of innovative techniques to filmmaking.
Kane is commonly regarded as the best film of all time - if there can really be such a thing - by both critics and academics. But, as the Forum series demonstrated, his artistry extended into many other areas. Although he was, in later years, criticised as a ham, he put his formidable bulk and sonorous voice to work for many other directors as an actor when Hollywood abandoned him as a filmmaker.
Many of his acting jobs - such as the evil charmer Harry Lime in The Third Man and the hellfire preacher in Moby Dick - are still well-known to audiences. But Welles also excelled at many less documented artistic pursuits. He loved the then-new medium of television, where he enjoyed the challenge of telling a story in a short period of time. He was a master of theatre direction who strove to find new ways to stage his shows. His many radio broadcasts took existing techniques such as sound effects and refined them to perfection. He was also a competent magician, believing that - like Georges Melies, one of the inventors of cinema - film itself was a kind of magic show.
Welles was always destined for greatness, or thought he was. Born in 1915 to an inventor (who apparently invented the motor car, but didn't bother to patent it) and an artist, Welles could engage adults in serious debate at the age of three. He was too precocious an infant to attend school, and educated himself by questioning his mother's artist and writer friends. He decided that he wanted to become an actor early on, and made his New York debut in a well reviewed version of Romeo and Juliet in 1934, at the age of 19.
His performance as the villainous Tybalt was reportedly so vitriolic that it frightened some of the audience. It also brought him to the attention of theatre entrepreneur John Houseman, who decided to allow the young actor to fulfil his ambition of becoming a theatre director. Welles' first two plays set the tone for his later career in terms of innovation, daring and sheer nerve. His first was an all-black version of Shakespeare's Macbeth for the Negro People's Theatre in New York's Harlem. It received polarised reviews, and immediately got him noticed. He followed up with Julius Caesar, boldly striking out lines from the Bard's work to make it fit his vision. But it was Welles' radio work that led to national fame.