Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles

A decade in the research and writing, biographer Frank Brady's Citizen Welles is the first comprehensive life story, definitive for our time, of Orson Welles through to his death in 1985. Welles's influence on several generations of American filmmakers, from Kubrick to Spielberg, for example, is incalculable. Welles's creative achievements, from the best known --- his all-time great movie Citizen Kane and his notorious radio show The War of the Worlds --- to his pioneering presentations in the popular theater of the classics of Shakespeare, Shaw, Ionesco, and his stardom as an actor are at the heart of Brady's biography. But Brady tells, too, the more personal side of Welle's life, such as his amours with Rita Hayworth and Dolores Del Rio and the confounding tragedy of Welles's sad final years, in part, Brady shows, the consequences of tee early success. The young Welles toured with Katherine Cornell; starred on Broadway in Shaw's Heartbreak House, when he made the cover of Time; acted in Hamlet in the Gate Theatre in Dublin. His films such as The Magnificent Ambersons, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight (his Falstaff may well be the greatest of all Falstaffs) were among the best of all time. Brady clarifies the whys and wherefores of Welles's extraordinary success and his end, when Welles was uniformly rejected by Hollywood as a noncommercial iconoclast. The great continuing popular interest in posthumous Orson Welles is vivid evidence of the shortsightedness of that view.