George Orson Welles
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In 1941, Orson Welles made his feature debut with Citizen Kane, a film that regularly appears at the top of greatest-films lists. He gained notoriety in 1938 for his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. He received the Academy Honorary Award in 1971 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1975. He died of a heart attack in 1985.
Names, aliases, and relatives of Orson Welles — birth name, kin, and personal ties.
Orson Welles by the numbers — life, work, and family.
Orson Welles — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to Richard Head Welles, an inventor, and Beatrice Ives Welles, a concert pianist. After his mother died in 1924, he traveled the world with his father, who died in 1930, leaving Welles orphaned at 15. He became the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein and graduated from the Todd Seminary for Boys in 1931. He rejected college to pursue a sketching tour of Ireland.
Welles made his New York stage debut as Tybalt in Katharine Cornell’s 1934 production of Romeo and Juliet. In 1937, he co-founded the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman. Their 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds caused widespread panic and made him famous. His first film, Citizen Kane 1941, was a commercial failure but is now hailed as a masterpiece. He later directed The Lady from Shanghai 1947 and Touch of Evil 1958. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Citizen Kane in 1942.
Welles married three times: to Virginia Nicolson from 1934 to 1940, to actress Rita Hayworth from 1943 to 1947, and to Paola Mori from 1955 until his death. He had three children: Chris Welles Feder, Rebecca Welles, and Beatrice Welles. In his later years, he struggled with obesity, weighing over 350 pounds, and died of a heart attack on October 10, 1985, while working on a script.
Despite many box-office failures, Welles received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1975 and the D.W. Griffith Award from the Directors Guild of America in 1984. His performance as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane is ranked among the finest in cinema history. He is remembered for pushing artistic boundaries, influencing directors like Peter Bogdanovich and Francis Ford Coppola.
Browse the complete filmography of Orson Welles — every film, TV show, and documentary credit, ranked by popularity.
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Every award, honor, and recognition received by Orson Welles — Grammys, hall-of-fame inductions, civic honors, lifetime achievements.
Orson Welles's bibliography — every authored, edited, and co-written book, ranked by edition count.
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A wall of memorable lines from Orson Welles — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
Even If the Good Old Days Never Existed, the Fact That We Can Conceive Such a World Is, in Fact, an Affirmation of the Human Spirit.
I’m Not Very Fond of Movies. I Don’t Go to Them Much.
I Started at the Top and Worked Down.
I’m Not Bitter About Hollywood’s Treatment of Me, but Over Its Treatment of D.W. Griffith, Josef Von Sternberg, Erich Von Stroheim, Buster Keaton and a Hundred Others.
Movie Directing Is the Perfect Refuge for the Mediocre.
I Hate Television. I Hate It as Much as Peanuts. but I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
If There Hadn’t Been Women We’d Still Be Squatting in a Cave Eating Raw Meat, Because We Made Civilization in Order to Impress Our Girlfriends. and They Tolerated It and Let Us Go Ahead and Play with Our Toys.
I Hate It When People Pray on the Screen. It’s Not Because I Hate Praying, but Whenever I See an Actor Fold His Hands and Look up in the Spotlight, I’m Lost. There’s Only One Other Thing in the Movies I Hate as Much, and That’s Sex. You Just Can’t Get in Bed or Pray to God and Convince Me on the Screen.
For Thirty Years, People Have Been Asking Me How I Reconcile X with Y! the Truthful Answer Is That I Don’t. Everything About Me Is a Contradiction and so Is Everything About Everybody Else. We Are Made Out of Oppositions; We Live Between Two Poles. There Is a Philistine and an Aesthete in All of Us, and a Murderer and a Saint. You Don’t Reconcile the Poles. You Just Recognize Them.
My Doctor Told Me to Stop Having Intimate Dinners for Four. Unless There Are Three Other People.
I Think I’m… I Made Essentially a Mistake Staying in Movies, Because I… but It… It’s the Mistake I Can’t Regret Because It’s Like Saying, I Shouldn’t Have Stayed Married to That Woman, but I Did Because I Love Her. I Would Have Been More Successful If I’d Left Movies Immediately. Stayed in the Theater, Gone into Politics, Written Anything. I’ve Wasted the Greater Part of My Life Looking for Money, and Trying to Get Along… Trying to Make My Work from This Terribly Expensive Paint Box Which Is An… a Movie. and I’ve Spent Too Much Energy on Things That Have Nothing to Do with a Movie. It’s About 2% Movie Making and 98% Hustling. It’s No Way to Spend a Life.
I Think It Is Always a Tremendously Good Formula in Any Art Form to Admit the Limitations of the Form.
I Don’t Pray Because I Don’t Want to Bore God.
A Film Is Never Really Good Unless the Camera Is an Eye in the Head of a Poet.
I Have the Terrible Feeling That, Because I Am Wearing a White Beard and Am Sitting in the Back of the Theater, You Expect Me to Tell You the Truth About Something. These Are the Cheap Seats, Not Mount Sinai.
The Word Genius Was Whispered into My Ear, the First Thing I Ever Heard, While I Was Still Mewling in My Crib. so It Never Occurred to Me That I Wasn’t Until Middle Age.
I Passionately Hate the Idea of Being with It; I Think an Artist Has Always to Be Out of Step with His Time.
Everybody Denies That I Am Genius but Nobody Ever Called Me One.
A Good Artist Should Be Isolated. If He Isn’t Isolated, Something Is Wrong.
Hollywood Is the Only Industry, Even Taking in Soup Companies, Which Does Not Have Laboratories for the Purpose of Experimentation.
I Do Not Suppose I Shall Be Remembered for Anything. but I Don’t Think About My Work in Those Terms. It Is Just as Vulgar to Work for the Sake of Posterity as to Work for the Sake of Money.
Race Hate Isn’t Human Nature; Race Hate Is the Abandonment of Human Nature.
Living in the Lap of Luxury Isn’t Bad, Except You Never Know When Luxury Is Going to Stand Up.
I Want to Give the Audience a Hint of a Scene. No More Than That. Give Them Too Much and They Won’t Contribute Anything Themselves. Give Them Just a Suggestion and You Get Them Working with You. That’s What Gives the Theater Meaning: When It Becomes a Social Act.
If Spiritually You’re Part of the Cat Family, You Can’t Bear to Be Laughed At. You Have to Pretend When You Fall Down That You Really Wanted to Be Down There to See What’s Under the Sofa. the Rest of Us Don’t at All Mind Being Laughed At.
The Optimists Are Incapable of Understanding What It Means to Adore the Impossible.
I Don’t Think History Can Possibly Be True. Possibly! I’ll Tell You Why. We All Know People Who Get Things Written About, and We Know That They’re Lies Written. I Told a Story to Buck Henry, Last Year in Weymouth, and He Told the Story That He Thought I Told Him to a Newspaper That I Read the Other Day, and It Bears Not the *Slightest* Resemblance to What I Said! Now, That’s an Intelligent Man, a Year Later, Meaning Me Well, and That’s the Gospel According to Buck Henry, and It’s Totally Apocryphal. Imagine What Nonsense Everything Else Is!
The Only Good Artists Are Feminine. I Don’t Believe an Artist Exists Whose Dominant Characteristic Is Not Feminine. It’s Nothing to Do with Homosexuality, but Intellectually an Artist Must Be a Man with Feminine Aptitudes.
I Know That in Theory the Word Is Secondary in Cinema, but the Secret of My Work Is That Everything Is Based on the Word. I Always Begin with the Dialogue. and I Do Not Understand How One Dares to Write Action Before Dialogue. I Must Begin with What the Characters Say. I Must Know What They Say Before Seeing Them Do What They Do.
A Poet Needs a Pen, a Painter a Brush, and a Director an Army.
I Liked the Cinema Better Before I Began to Do It. Now I Can’t Stop Myself from Hearing the Clappers at the Beginning of Each Shot. All the Magic Is Destroyed.
In His Time, Samuel Goldwyn Was Considered a Classy Producer Because He Never Deliberately Did Anything That Wasn’t His Idea of the Best Quality Goods. I Respected Him for That. He Was an Honest Merchant. He May Have Made a Bad Picture, but He Didn’t Know It Was a Bad Picture. and He Was Funny. He Actually Once Said to Me, in That High Voice of His, Orson, for You I’d Write a Blanket Check. He Said, with Warner Brothers, a Verbal Commitment Isn’t Worth the Paper It’s Written On..
Little-known facts about Orson Welles — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
George Lucas first chose him to voice Darth Vader in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope 1977, but Welles thought his voice too recognizable. He did narrate the film’s trailers.
He died two hours after an interview on The Merv Griffin Show on October 10, 1985, reportedly working on a typewriter in his lap.
When RKO execs hesitated on Citizen Kane 1941, Welles requested equipment for test shots. He filmed actual scenes, and by the time execs realized, they had financed the picture.
He considered black and white film the actor’s best friend, believing it focused on expressions rather than colors.
H.G. Wells once asked Orson Welles for directions in San Antonio, Texas, and they spent the day together.
In the 1930s, to avoid New York traffic, he hired ambulances to blast sirens between radio stations, exploiting a legal loophole.
Frank Sinatra was godfather to his daughter Rebecca Welles with Rita Hayworth.
He and John Huston became good friends from the 1940s onward; each directed the other in films like Moby Dick 1956 and The Other Side of the Wind 2018.
He hated working on The Transformers: The Movie 1986, describing his role as a big toy attacking smaller toys.
Despite his film career, he maintained memberships in magic fraternities and regularly practiced sleight-of-hand.
His role as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane 1941 ranked #12 on Premiere’s 100 Greatest Movie Characters.
He advised Peter Bogdanovich to film The Last Picture Show 1971 in black and white, leading to an Oscar nomination for cinematography.
He once called the audience the big, many-headed beast crouching out there in the darkness.
Laurence Olivier regretted not casting him as the Duke of Buckingham in Richard III 1955, giving the role to Ralph Richardson instead.
He is one of six actors nominated for Best Actor for a debut starring role, along with Paul Muni and James Dean.
Merv Griffin claimed Welles died two hours after an interview where he agreed to speak about any subject.
He was a passionate painter.
Entertainment Weekly voted him the second Greatest Film Director of all time.
He originally planned Heart of Darkness as his first film; later, Francis Ford Coppola wanted him as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now 1979.
He narrated trailers for Star Trek: The Motion Picture 1979.
ABC-TV wanted him to play Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island, but Aaron Spelling chose Ricardo Montalban.
He was suggested as a suspect in the Black Dahlia murder because of similarities between his film The Lady from Shanghai 1947 and the crime.
He became obese in his 40s, weighing over 350 pounds.
He told David Frost he feared his fortune-telling ability would become self-deluding.
Most of his later projects went unfinished due to financial issues, including The Deep 1970 and Don Quixote 1992.
He once ate 18 hot dogs at Pink’s in Los Angeles.
He became a father for the fourth time at age 40 with the birth of Beatrice Welles in 1955.
He and Yul Brynner both died on October 10, 1985.
He voiced Harry Lime on the radio series The Lives of Harry Lime 1951-52, based on his film role.
His role as Harry Lime in The Third Man 1949 ranked #93 on Premiere’s 100 Greatest Movie Characters.
He and Joseph Cotten both appear in the American Film Institute and British Film Institute’s number-one films: Citizen Kane and The Third Man.
He was friends with Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito.
He remained good friends with Joseph Cotten until his death.
His ashes are buried in an old well in Ronda, Spain, on the property of bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez.
He refused to record a commentary for Citizen Kane, saying he was tired of talking about it.
His typical dinner was two rare steaks and a pint of Scotch, contributing to his obesity and death.
He tried to film Don Quixote from 1955 through the 1970s; an incomplete version was released in 1992.
He made Rita Hayworth cut her hair and dye it platinum for The Lady from Shanghai 1947 during their tumultuous marriage.
His only box-office hit during his lifetime was The Stranger 1946.
John Ford wanted to cast him in The Last Hurrah 1958, but Welles declined due to scheduling.
He had supporting roles in Moby Dick 1956 and Catch-22 1970, films he had wanted to direct.
His Broadway production of Julius Caesar 1937 was the longest-running until it closed.
He rewrote the script for Touch of Evil 1958 completely, ignoring the original source novel.
CBS rejected him as host of The Twilight Zone because of his fee demands.
He is one of eight men nominated for Best Actor and Best Director for the same film: Citizen Kane 1941.
He was of German, Irish, and Scottish descent and spoke French fluently.
Vincent D’Onofrio played him in Ed Wood 1994 and Five Minutes, Mr. Welles 2005.
His unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind 2018 was completed posthumously.
He was a huge fan of animated films.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about Orson Welles.
Celebrities similar to Orson Welles — same craft, ranked by reach.
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