Orson Welles
George Orson Welles was born the 6 of May of 1915.Orson Welles was an American film director, writer, actor and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television, and radio. Welles was also an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety spectacles in the war years. Noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality, Welles is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished dramatic artists of the 20th century. His first two films with RKO: Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, are widely considered two of the greatest ever made. His other films, including Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, are also considered masterpieces.He was also well-known for a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds which, performed in the style of a news broadcast, reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an actual extraterrestrial invasion was in progress.
In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project (part of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration) put unemployed theater performers and employees to work. Welles was hired by John Houseman and assigned to direct a play for the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Theater Unit. He offered them Macbeth, in a production that became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, because Welles set it in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe, with voodoo witch doctors for the three Weird Sisters. Jack Carter [disambiguation needed] played Macbeth. The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. The play was rapturously received and later toured the nation. When the lead (Maurice Evans) fell ill on tour, Welles jumped on a plane and stepped into the part playing the role in blackface. At the age of 20, Welles was hailed as a prodigy. A few minutes of Welles’ production of Macbeth was recorded on film in a 1937 documentary called We Work Again.
Resigning from the Federal Theatre, Welles and Houseman formed their own company, the Mercury Theatre, which eventually included actors such as Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotten, Dolores del Río, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Frank Readick, Everett Sloane, Eustace Wyatt and Erskine Sanford, all of whom would continue to work for Welles for years. The first Mercury Theatre production was a melodramatic and heavily edited version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, set in a contemporary frame of fascist Italy. Cinna the Poet dies at the hands not of a mob but a secret police force. According to Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna, “it stopped the show”. The applause lasted more than 3 minutes and the production was widely acclaimed.
In the second year of the Mercury Theater, Welles shifted his interests to radio, as an actor, director and producer. He played Hamlet for CBS on The Columbia Workshop, adapting and directing the play himself. The Mutual Network gave him a seven-week series to adapt Les Misérables, which he did with great success. Welles was chosen to anonymously play Lamont Cranston, The Shadow, in late 1937 (again for Mutual) and in the summer of 1938 CBS gave him (and the Mercury Theatre) a weekly hour-long show to broadcast radio plays based on classic literary works. The show was titled The Mercury Theatre on the Air, with original music by Bernard Herrmann, who would continue working with Welles on radio and in films for years.
The following year, Welles starred as Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, alongside his good friend and Citizen Kane co-star Joseph Cotten, with a script by Graham Greene and a memorable zither score by Anton Karas. The film was an international smash hit, but Welles unfortunately turned down a percentage of the gross in exchange for a lump-sum advance. A few years later British radio producer Harry Alan Towers would resurrect the Lime character for radio in the series The Lives of Harry Lime. The 1951 series included new recordings by Karas, was very successful, and ran for 52 weeks. Welles claimed to write a handful of episodes – a claim disputed by Towers, who maintains they were written by Ernest Borneman – which would later serve as the basis for the screenplay of Welles’ Mr. Arkadin (1955).Welles also appeared as Cesare Borgia in the 1949 Italian film Prince of Foxes, with Tyrone Power and Mercury Theatre alumnus Everett Sloane.
