Orson Welles

Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at twenty-five with a contract giving him final cut, and never had that freedom again. He was a prodigy from Kenosha, Wisconsin, orphaned by fifteen, who talked his way onto the Dublin stage at sixteen by claiming to be a Broadway star. With John Houseman he ran the Federal Theatre unit that staged an all-Black Macbeth in Harlem in 1936, and then the Mercury Theatre. The 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, presented as news bulletins, produced a panic whose size was exaggerated by newspapers glad to attack radio. RKO gave him unprecedented terms; Citizen Kane, based recognisably on William Randolph Hearst, was attacked by the Hearst press, lost money and won a single Oscar for its screenplay. The Magnificent Ambersons was cut by the studio while he was in Brazil and the excised footage destroyed. He spent the rest of his life financing his own films by acting in other people's - Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, Othello, shot over three years as money appeared. He narrated, appeared in advertisements, and left several films unfinished at his death. Citizen Kane topped the Sight and Sound poll for fifty years. He played Harry Lime in The Third Man in 1949 and wrote the cuckoo-clock speech himself, and the part paid for months of his own shooting. F for Fake in 1973 is a film about forgery that is also an admission about his own career. He spent the last fifteen years shooting The Other Side of the Wind, which was not assembled and released until 2018, thirty-three years after his death. The American Film Institute gave him its life achievement award in 1975, at which he showed footage from a film he could not finance. He died in Los Angeles and his ashes were buried on a friend's estate near Ronda in Spain.

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