Hong Kong celebrates Orson Welles, born 100 years ago this month
Seven films showing over the summer directed by Welles, the ultimate American showman
The second child of inventor Richard and opera singer Beatrice Welles was born 100 years ago on May 6 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. They named him George Orson Welles, but it didn’t take long before he shed George and Kenosha to become one of the best-known showmen in the United States.
At 21, he shook up the dull, predictable Broadway theatre world with an all-black production of Macbeth, then followed it with a chilling modern-dress Julius Caesar in 1937 as fascism gripped Germany and Italy. His sonorous voice was heard on so many live radio dramas that he hired an ambulance, with siren wailing, to get him from job to job in Manhattan traffic.
Kicked out of one theatre when the government shut down his Federal Theatre Project production of the left-wing musical The Cradle Will Rock, he marched the cast down Broadway to an empty theatre and staged Marc Blitzstein’s attack on American capitalism.
Welles formed the Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938 on CBS radio to present hour-long versions of classics, but the Sunday night show had no sponsors. Inspired by the live broadcasts of the European crisis that year, he and writer Howard Koch rewrote H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as news bulletins interrupting musical programmes.
The Halloween broadcast was a sensation, earning Welles sponsors, the cover of Time magazine (at 23), and a film contract granting him unheard-of creative freedom in Hollywood. Accused of causing panic among listeners, Welles said: “I didn’t go to jail; I went to Hollywood instead.”
