Little-Known Details About Orson Welles’ Strange And Extraordinary Life
There have been very few artists who have changed the face of Hollywood in the way that Orson Welles did. Though he arguably never quite fulfilled the promise of his stunning debut film Citizen Kane, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Throughout his career, Welles consistently took risks and pushed the boundaries of cinema, and it sometimes landed him in hot water. These little-known details shed a fascinating new light on the unique man and talent that was Orson Welles.
He was a sickly child
According to The New York Times, Welles was “born with anomalies of the spine that would cause him pain for all his long life.” On top of that, he was also struck down with a variety of illnesses in his youth, including malaria, diptheria, whooping cough, and measles.
He also had asthma and flat feet, which — coupled with his spine abnormality — meant he was plagued by issues with his feet and ankles, not to mention a backache that refused to go away. This combination of maladies left him unable to leave his bed for most of his childhood.
Welles was a baby genius
According to family legend, when in 1916 a doctor came to check on Welles’ brother Richard’s head injury, he had a bizarre encounter with the 18-month-old Welles. According to The New York Times, Doctor Bernstein claimed the little tyke had looked out of his crib and declared, “The desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which distinguish men from animals.”
He supposedly ran to Welles’ parents Beatrice and Dick and told them their son was some kind of child genius, or even a prodigy. He then requested something a little… strange.
The doctor wanted to unlock Welles’ gifts…or did he?
You see, the good doctor wanted to foster the toddler’s obvious mental gifts, so he began showing up every day with educational ones. He gave the child, “a violin, although Orson was much too tiny to grasp it properly; a conductor's baton; painting and sculpting equipment; a puppet theater; a theatrical makeup case.”
Bernstein became such a fixture in the home that Welles began calling him “Dadda,” and the medic developed a close relationship with Beatrice too. No affair was ever confirmed to have taken place, but the situation was certainly odd all the same.
He traveled to Ireland alone at only 16 years old
When Welles was only 16 years old, he left high school and travelled to Dublin, Ireland, to begin a “cultural education,” which would — theoretically — culminate in a career as an actor. It was on his second night in Dublin that he found himself in the Gate Theater watching The Melians.
Quite by chance, one of the cast members was someone he vaguely knew from back home. The confident young Welles used this slim connection to get himself backstage, and he quickly found out the theater was looking for a lead for its next play, a production of Jew Suss.
A little white lie earned him his first role
The ultra-confident Welles seized his opportunity. He told the theater’s co-founder Hilton Edwards that he was 18 — a lie — and already a well-known actor in the New York theater scene — an even bigger lie. Edwards was struck by the teen’s charisma and wise-beyond-his years aura.
Amusingly, he would later admit he hadn’t believed Welles’ claims at all, but he still hired him for the lead, which shows just how far moxie and charisma can take a person! Welles wound up performing in several productions at the Gate before returning home to America in 1932.
Welles was an accomplished magician
When Welles was a kid, his godfather helped to spark one of his lifelong loves when he gifted the young boy a magic set. Welles would go on to perform on stage at any opportunity, including for British royalty — three times — and for the troops during World War Two.
His flat feet had ruled him out of serving on the front line, so he journeyed across Europe showing the soldiers some of his best illusions, including the classic “saw a woman in half” trick. The only difference was that his beautiful assistant was Hollywood leading lady Marlene Dietrich!
He may have loved magic more than film
Welles was in the middle of putting together a televised magic show when he passed away in 1985. John Gaughan, who designed props for all the top magicians and had worked closely with Welles, told the Los Angeles Times, “Welles loved magic more than anything — his films, the stage, anything.”
In fact, Jim Steinmeyer — a magical-effects creator who also worked with Welles — believed the man had been frustrated that the world didn’t see him as a magician first and foremost, instead of an actor and director.
Welles rode in an ambulance to save time
In 1937 Welles founded his own theater company in New York with John Houseman. Dubbed the Mercury Theater, its first production was a modern-day version of Julius Caesar, simply titled Caesar.
Around the same time, Welles’ radio career began to go from strength to strength, and he soon found that getting across Manhattan from his theater to the radio stations became extremely difficult. Amazingly, he decided to hire ambulances to get him from A to B on time, because they didn’t have to obey the usual rules of traffic!
Mercury Theater on Air was a big success
By the time October 1938 rolled around, Welles had been having success with Mercury Theater on Air, which saw his theater company adapt many a classic story for the radio. He wanted to try something very different for the Halloween season, though.
In 1960 he explained, “I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.”
He almost derailed his career with a terrifying radio broadcast
What crisis would the broadcast dramatize, though? Why, an alien invasion, of course! Welles and his team decided to update H.G. Wells’ classic 1898 novel War of the Worlds — about an invasion of Victorian England — to New Jersey in 1938.
To be as believable as possible, they formatted the story as a series of fake news bulletins reporting on the terrifying event. The response from the public shocked everyone at Mercury. As Welles reportedly put it at the time, “If I’d planned to wreck my career, I couldn’t have gone about it better.”
The American public believed War of the Worlds was real
You see, many sections of the great American public didn’t realize the radio broadcast was fictional: they thought the news was telling them about a real invasion! Hysterical listeners phoned the police, local newspaper offices, and radio stations in a panic, and Welles claimed he heard talk of suicides and mass stampedes.
When people found out they’d been — unintentionally — hoodwinked, some furious listeners supposedly even said they wanted to shoot Welles dead. He soon found his picture plastered on the front pages of every newspaper.
"A multimedia genius and trickster extraordinaire"
Welles was now famous — or infamous — for terrifying the country. But in those early days, he insisted that had never been his intention. He claimed no one at Mercury ever thought the public would believe the broadcast was real, although in later years he changed his tune slightly, saying there was always the hope in the back of his mind that they’d fool some people.
Still, the controversial situation did lead Welles to Hollywood. As Smithsonian magazine put it, “The wunderkind of the New York stage exploded onto the national scene as a multimedia genius and trickster extraordinaire.”
Citizen Kane flopped on its initial release
At only 25 years old, Welles had established enough of a reputation from his theater and radio work to sign a deal with RKO Pictures which granted him total creative control over his first directorial effort. The fruits of his labor were Citizen Kane, now seen by many as the greatest motion picture ever made.
At the time, though, it lost the studio around $150,000: the box-office takings were extremely disappointing. This would become a recurring theme in Welles’ career; in fact, not a single one of his movies made a profit upon initial release.
William Randolph Hearst hated Welles
It’s believed one of the inspirations for Charles Foster Kane was legendary newspaper man William Randolph Hearst: he wasn’t happy about it. In fact, it’s rumored he offered RKO Pictures enough money to cover the film’s budget and a profit if they would shelve its release.
When that didn’t work, Hearst gave an edict to all the newspapers he owned that Welles’ name was verboten within their pages, with the only allowed exception, “pointing out that he is a menace to American motherhood, freedom of speech and assembly, and the pursuit of happiness.”
An encounter with Hearst himself
In 1941 Welles denied Hearst was the inspiration for Kane, even issuing a statement saying, “It is the portrait of a fictional newspaper tycoon, and I have never said or implied to anyone that it is anything else.” Years later, though, he admitted, “There are parallels, but these can be just as misleading as comparisons.”
Welles and Hearst only crossed paths once, at a premiere in San Francisco. Welles claimed he’d offered the tycoon free tickets but was summarily dismissed. He chuckled, “As he was getting off at his floor, I said, ‘Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.’”
He campaigned hard to play Don Corleone in The Godfather
Welles wanted to play Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal masterpiece The Godfather so much that he directly contacted Mario Puzo, the author of the source novel and screenplay.
His attempts at persuasion would be ignored, though, as Puzo was dead set on Marlon Brando playing the part. In fact, he was so keen that he contacted Brando directly in a letter which stated, “You’re the only actor who could play this role with the quiet intensity that it deserves or requires.”
He once voiced a living planet which ate other planets
Welles’ last role was lending his baritone vocals to 1986’s Transformers: The Movie. He played Unicron, a villainous planet that drifted through space devouring other worlds. Yes, really. Welles’ hilarious verdict was, “I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy whoever-it-is is thwarted, and I tear myself apart on the screen.”
While many — including perhaps the man himself — think this was an ignominious way to end a storied career, an entire generation of boys who came of age in the ‘80s disagree entirely!
Welles was the king of unfinished projects
In total, Welles directed 13 feature films — including one documentary — which were released to the public. Yet over the course of his career, he became almost as famous for the movies he didn’t make, as well as the projects he mounted and partially shot before they were abandoned in various stages of completion.
Cineastes have become obsessed with these lost pictures, as there is so much mystery surrounding them. To be fair, though, Welles often played into this legend by revealing contradictory titbits of information about them.
Don Quixote is his most infamous lost picture
The most well-known lost film in Welles’ incomplete oeuvre was his adaptation of Don Quixote, which he began work on in 1955. He chipped away at it for so long, though, that its star Francisco Reguera passed away before he had a chance to finish getting his dialog down on tape.
In 1972 — a full 17 years after production had begun — he told a journalist the film simply required a small amount of sound work and then it could be released. But a decade later, he said he wanted to film in Spain in order to turn the picture into a pseudo-documentary.
He was an artist who wouldn’t be rushed
The rumors surrounding why the film wasn’t being released continued to swirl, with many assuming Welles didn’t have the budget to complete it satisfactorily. He rejected this, though, in 1981 telling an audience of university students, “I will finish it as an author would finish it, at my own pace.”
After Welles had died, a few versions of the film finally saw the light of day, including a 45-minute short assembled by Costa-Gavras for the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. But a definitive director’s edition will forever be lost to history.
A project had to be abandoned because footage was stolen
Sadly, another project — his 1969 Shakespeare adaptation The Merchant of Venice — was quite literally stolen away from him. He played the classic role of Shylock in the 40-minute short, which was supposed to be part of a TV show entitled Orson’s Bag. He held a private screening in 1969 and was subsequently horrified to find someone had pilfered some important reels from his Rome office.
With these missing, the film could never be finished — and it took until 2013 for two of the lost reels to finally show up again. The Munich Film Festival then assembled a reconstruction cut.
His final film came out more than 30 years after his death
Astonishingly, another of Welles’ lost works finally saw release in 2018 — more than 30 years after his death. The Other Side of the Wind — a documentary-style Hollywood satire about the birthday of a famed director — was originally shot between 1970 and 1976. It then languished for years, with a release looking unlikely thanks to bitter legal battles and a dwindling post-production budget.
Eventually, after decades of pushing by director Peter Bogdanovich — who starred in the picture — it debuted on Netflix, alongside an accompanying “making of” documentary called They'll Love Me When I'm Dead.
Welles was seen as a womanizer
According to Peter Sheridan of the Daily Express, Welles was “an incorrigible womanizer, always juggling mistresses and wives.” He married three different women, walking down the aisle for the first time when he was only 19 years old. This first marriage was to actress Virginia Nicholson, who left him after only six years. She damningly once said, “Orson doesn’t have time to be married.”
This was a thinly veiled comment on Welles’ repeated infidelities with Delores Del Rio and Geraldine Fitzgerald, affairs he reportedly engaged in while Nicholson was pregnant with their daughter, Chris.
The iconic Rita Hayworth was wife number two
Welles’ next wife was undoubtedly the most famous: screen icon Rita Hayworth! They had one daughter named Rebecca, but their union only lasted five years. Once again, Welles’ inability — or unwillingness — to stop womanizing was the culprit for the breakup.
The day before he died, Welles appeared on The Merv Griffin Show and gushed that Hayworth was “one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived, and we were a long time together. I was lucky enough to have been with her longer than any of the other men in her life.”
Moving between two home lives
In 1955 Welles married Italian actress Paola Mori in what many have described as a “shotgun wedding.” You see, her aristocratic family had pushed for the wedding after Mori had fallen pregnant with the couple’s daughter, Beatrice.
From 1966 on, though, Welles’ partner was actress Oja Kodar, who was 26 years younger than him. Incredibly, he was never actually divorced from Mori the whole time he was with Kodar; he reportedly had a home with both women, alternating between them as the relationships dictated!
George Lucas wanted him to play Darth Vader!
When George Lucas was scouring the galaxy — or, rather, Hollywood — for a commanding voice to bring life to Darth Vader in Star Wars, he narrowed it down to two guys. One was James Earl Jones, who would of course wind up seizing the part.
But the other was Welles, who had returned to Hollywood in the ‘70s, after spending the ‘60s in Europe. It’s not entirely known how close Welles truly was to signing up, but in 2015 Lucas claimed, “I knew the voice had to be very, very special… James Earl Jones won hands down.”
He believed The Trial was his true masterpiece
In 1962 Welles told the BBC, “If I'd only stayed in the theater, I could have worked steadily, without stopping for all these years. But, having made one film, I decided that it was the best and most beautiful form that I knew and one that I wanted to continue with.”
Taking this into consideration gives extra weight to his opinion on The Trial, a film that wasn’t particularly well-received at the time, but is now considered a masterpiece. He bullishly stated, “Say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I have ever made.”
He loved painting and left behind many works
In 2018 a documentary was released entitled The Eyes of Orson Welles, and it wasn’t dedicated to his films. Instead, it was all about the incredible legacy of artwork he left behind after his death. Welles was a keen artist, you see, and dabbled with many different disciplines over the years.
As The Guardian’s Guy Lodge put it, his interests ran “from stately oil paintings to irreverent pencil cartoons, fevered film storyboards to perverse handmade Christmas cards.” He barely ever noted the date on any of his work, though, so it’s up to interpretation as to when he created each piece.
Welles had a love/hate relationship with Hollywood
In 1985 a 70-year-old Welles was brutally honest about Hollywood; it was obvious that being put through the ringer over the years had left a lasting impression on him. He told The New York Times, “We live in a snakepit here.”
He continued, “I’ve been keeping a secret from myself for 40 years — from myself, not from the world — which is that I hate it. And I just don't allow myself to face the fact that I hold it in contempt. I don't tell myself that, because it keeps turning out to be the only place to go.”