Age, Biography, and Wiki
Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, and passed away on October 10, 1985. He was an iconic figure in American cinema, celebrated for his work in film, theater, and radio. Welles' career spanned over five decades, during which he received numerous awards and accolades for his contributions to the film industry, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for "Citizen Kane" and the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award.
| Occupation | Film Producer |
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| Date of Birth | 6 May 1915 |
| Age | 110 Years |
| Birth Place | Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Taurus |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 10 October, 1985 |
| Died Place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
While specific details about Orson Welles' height and weight are not always consistent across sources, he was generally described as being tall and heavyset. His physical appearance was often a subject of interest due to his distinctive voice and presence on screen.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Orson Welles was married three times:
- Virginia Nicolson (married in 1934, divorced in 1940)
- Rita Hayworth (married in 1943, divorced in 1948)
- Paola Mori (married in 1955, remained married until his death in 1985).
Despite his family's affluence, Welles encountered hardship when his parents separated and moved to Chicago in 1919. His father, who made a fortune as the inventor of a bicycle lamp, became an alcoholic and stopped working. Welles's mother was a concert pianist who had studied with the pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky. She played during lectures by Dudley Crafts Watson at the Art Institute of Chicago to support her son and herself. Welles received piano and violin lessons arranged by his mother. The older Welles boy, "Dickie", was institutionalized because he had learning difficulties. Beatrice died of hepatitis in a Chicago hospital on May 10, 1924, just after Welles's ninth birthday. The Gordon String Quartet, a predecessor to the Berkshire String Quartet, which had made its first appearance at her home in 1921, played at Beatrice's funeral.
After her death, Welles ceased pursuing a musical career. It was decided he would spend the summer with the Watson family at a private art colony established by Lydia Avery Coonley Ward in the village of Wyoming in the Finger Lakes Region of New York. There, he played and became friends with the children of the Aga Khan, including the 12-year-old Prince Aly Khan. Then, in what Welles later described as "a hectic period", he lived in a Chicago apartment with his father and Maurice Bernstein, a Chicago physician who had been a close friend of his parents. Welles attended public school before his alcoholic father left business altogether and took him on his travels to Jamaica and the Far East. When they returned, they settled in a hotel in Grand Detour, Illinois, owned by his father. When the hotel burned down, Welles and his father took to the road again.
On December 28, 1930, when Welles was 15, his father died of heart and kidney failure aged 58, in a hotel in Chicago. Shortly before, Welles had told his father that he refused to see him until he stopped drinking. Welles suffered lifelong guilt and despair that he was unable to express. "That was the last I ever saw of him," Welles told biographer Barbara Leaming 53 years later. "I've never, never ... I don't want to forgive myself." His father's will left it to Welles to name his guardian. When Roger Hill declined, he chose Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a physician and friend of the family.
After his father's death, Welles traveled to Europe using a portion of his inheritance. Welles said that while on a walking and painting trip through Ireland, he strode into the Gate Theatre in Dublin and claimed he was a Broadway star. The manager of the Gate, Hilton Edwards, later said he had not believed Welles but was impressed by his brashness and an impassioned audition. Welles made his stage debut at the Gate Theatre on October 13, 1931, appearing in Ashley Dukes's adaptation of Jud Süß as Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. He performed supporting roles in Gate productions, and produced and designed productions of his own. In March 1932, Welles performed in W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle at Dublin's Abbey Theatre and traveled to London to find work in the theatre. Unable to obtain a work permit, he returned to the U.S.
In 1933, Hortense and Roger Hill invited Welles to a party in Chicago, where Welles met Thornton Wilder. Wilder arranged for Welles to meet Alexander Woollcott in New York so he could be introduced to Katharine Cornell, who was assembling a theatre company for a seven-month transcontinental repertory tour. Cornell's husband, director Guthrie McClintic, immediately put Welles under contract and cast him in three plays. Romeo and Juliet, The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Candida began touring in repertory in November 1933, with the first of more than 200 performances taking place in Buffalo, New York.
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| Husband | Virginia Nicolson (m. 1934-1940) Rita Hayworth (m. 1943-1947) Paola Mori (m. 1955) |
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Net Worth and Salary
At the time of his death, Orson Welles' net worth was estimated to be around $100,000, which, adjusted for inflation, would be significantly higher today. His earnings primarily came from his work in film, theater, and radio. Despite his financial struggles throughout his life, Welles' legacy as a filmmaker continues to enrich the cinematic world, ensuring his influence extends beyond his lifetime earnings.
By 1935, Welles was supplementing his earnings in the theatre as a radio actor in Manhattan, working with many actors who later formed the core of his Mercury Theatre on programs including America's Hour, Cavalcade of America, Columbia Workshop and The March of Time. "Within a year of his debut Welles could claim membership in that elite band of radio actors who commanded salaries second only to the highest paid movie stars," wrote critic Richard France.
John Houseman, director of the Negro Theatre Unit in New York, invited Welles to join the Federal Theatre Project in 1935. Far from unemployed—"I was so employed I forgot how to sleep"—Welles put a large share of his $1,500-a-week radio earnings into his stage productions, bypassing administrative red tape and mounting the projects more quickly and professionally. "Roosevelt once said that I was the only operator in history who ever illegally siphoned money into a Washington project," Welles said.
Career, Business, and Investments
Welles' career was marked by groundbreaking films:
- "Citizen Kane" (1941): Considered one of the greatest films of all time, Welles won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
- "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942): Though his vision was compromised by studio edits, it remains a critical favorite.
- "Touch of Evil" (1958): A crime drama that showcased Welles' innovative direction and editing techniques.
In 1934, Welles got his first job on radio—with The American School of the Air—through actor-director Paul Stewart, who introduced him to director Knowles Entrikin. That summer, Welles staged a drama festival with the Todd School at the Opera House in Woodstock, Illinois, inviting Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards from Dublin's Gate Theatre to appear along with New York stage luminaries in productions including Trilby, Hamlet, The Drunkard and Tsar Paul. At the old firehouse in Woodstock, he also shot his first film, an eight-minute short titled The Hearts of Age.
The Federal Theatre Project was the ideal environment in which Welles could develop his art. Its purpose was employment, so he was able to hire many artists, craftsmen and technicians, and he filled the stage with performers. The company for the first production, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth with an African-American cast, numbered 150. The production became known as the Voodoo Macbeth because Welles changed the setting to a mythical island suggesting the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe, with Haitian vodou fulfilling the role of Scottish witchcraft. The play opened April 14, 1936, at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and was received rapturously. At 20, Welles was hailed as a prodigy. The production then made a 4,000-mile national tour that included two weeks at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas.
Breaking with the Federal Theatre Project in 1937, Welles and Houseman founded a repertory company, called the Mercury Theatre. The name was inspired by the title of the iconoclastic magazine The American Mercury. Welles was executive producer, and the original company included such actors as Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Arlene Francis, Martin Gabel, John Hoyt, Norman Lloyd, Vincent Price, Stefan Schnabel and Hiram Sherman.
Simultaneously with his work in the theatre, Welles worked extensively in radio as an actor, writer, director, and producer, often without credit. Between 1935-37 he was earning as much as $2,000 a week, shuttling between studios at such a pace that he would arrive barely in time for a scan of his lines before he was on the air. While he was directing the Voodoo Macbeth Welles was dashing between Harlem and midtown Manhattan three times a day to meet his radio commitments. In addition to continuing as a repertory player on The March of Time, in the fall of 1936 Welles adapted and performed Hamlet in an episode of CBS Radio's Columbia Workshop. His performance as the announcer in the series' April 1937 presentation of Archibald MacLeish's verse drama The Fall of the City was an important development in his radio career and made the 21-year-old Welles an overnight star.
In July 1937, the Mutual Network gave Welles a seven-week series to adapt Les Misérables. It was his first job as a writer-director for radio, the debut of the Mercury Theatre, and one of Welles's finest achievements. He invented the use of narration in radio.
"By making himself the center of the storytelling process, Welles fostered the impression of self-adulation that was to haunt his career to his dying day", wrote critic Andrew Sarris. "For the most part, however, Welles was singularly generous to the other members of his cast and inspired loyalty from them above and beyond the call of professionalism."
Social Network
In his time, Welles was not part of what we now consider a "social network" in the digital sense. However, his influence on contemporary filmmakers and his enduring legacy in cinema are evident through the many tributes and references to his work across various media platforms.
Aged 21, Welles directed high-profile stage productions for the Federal Theatre Project in New York City—starting with a celebrated 1936 adaptation of Macbeth with an African-American cast, and ending with the political musical The Cradle Will Rock in 1937. He and John Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre, an independent repertory theatre company that presented productions on Broadway through 1941, including a modern, politically charged Caesar (1937). In 1938, his radio anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air gave Welles the platform to find international fame as the director and narrator of a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, which caused some listeners to believe a Martian invasion was occurring. The event rocketed the 23-year-old to notoriety.
His distinctive directorial style featured layered and nonlinear narrative forms, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots and long takes. He has been praised as "the ultimate auteur. Welles was an outsider to the studio system and struggled for creative control on his projects early on with the major film studios in Hollywood and later with a variety of independent financiers across Europe, where he spent most of his career. Welles received an Academy Award and three Grammy Awards among other honors such as the Golden Lion in 1947, the Palme D'Or in 1952, the Academy Honorary Award in 1970, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1975, and the British Film Institute Fellowship in 1983. In 2002, he was voted the greatest ever film director of in British Film Institute polls among directors and critics. In 2018, he was included in the list of the greatest Hollywood actors of all time by The Daily Telegraph. Micheál Mac Liammóir, who worked with the 16-year-old Welles on the stage in Dublin and played Iago in his film Othello (1951), wrote that "Orson's courage, like everything else about him, imagination, egotism, generosity, ruthlessness, forbearance, impatience, sensitivity, grossness and vision is magnificently out of proportion."
The Mercury Theatre opened November 11, 1937, with Caesar, Welles's modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar—streamlined into an anti-fascist tour de force that Joseph Cotten later described as "so vigorous, so contemporary that it set Broadway on its ear". The set was completely open with no curtain, and the brick stage wall was painted dark red. Scene changes were achieved by lighting alone. On the stage was a series of risers; squares were cut into one at intervals and lights, designed by Jean Rosenthal, were set beneath it, pointing straight up to evoke the "cathedral of light" at the Nuremberg Rallies. "He staged it like a political melodrama that happened the night before," said Lloyd.
Education
Orson Welles attended the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, but his formal education ended early. He was largely self-taught in the arts, developing his skills through practice and experimentation in theater and film.
Welles attended public school in Madison, Wisconsin, enrolled in the fourth grade. On September 15, 1926, he entered the Todd Seminary for Boys, an expensive independent school in Woodstock, Illinois, that his older brother, Richard Ives Welles, had attended ten years before until he was expelled. At Todd School, Welles came under the influence of Roger Hill, a teacher who was later Todd's headmaster. Hill provided Welles with an ad hoc educational environment that proved invaluable to his creative experience, allowing Welles to concentrate on subjects that interested him. Welles performed and staged theatrical experiments and productions.
"Todd provided Welles with many valuable experiences," wrote critic Richard France. "He was able to explore and experiment in an atmosphere of acceptance and encouragement. In addition to a theatre, the school's own radio station was at his disposal." Welles's first radio experience was on the Todd station, where he performed an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes written by him.
Following graduation from Todd in May 1931, Welles was awarded a scholarship to Harvard College, while his mentor Roger Hill advocated he attend Cornell College in Iowa. Instead, Welles chose travel. He studied for a few weeks at the Art Institute of Chicago with Boris Anisfeld, who encouraged him to pursue painting.
Welles occasionally returned to Woodstock, the place he named when he was asked in a 1960 interview, "Where is home?" Welles replied, "I suppose it's Woodstock, Illinois, if it's anywhere. I went to school there for four years. If I try to think of a home, it's that."
Welles found his fame ephemeral and turned to a writing project at Todd School that became immensely successful, first entitled Everybody's Shakespeare, for the first three volumes, and subsequently, The Mercury Shakespeare. In Spring 1933, Welles traveled via the SS Exermont, a tramp steamer, writing the introduction for the books while onboard. After landing at Morocco, he stayed as the guest of Thami El Glaoui, in the Atlas mountains surrounding Tangier, while working on thousands of illustrations for the Everybody's Shakespeare series of educational books, a series that remained in print for decades.
Outside the scope of the Federal Theatre Project, American composer Aaron Copland chose Welles to direct The Second Hurricane (1937), an operetta with a libretto by Edwin Denby. Presented at the Henry Street Settlement Music School in New York for the benefit of high school students, the production opened April 21, 1937, and ran its scheduled three performances. In 1937, Welles rehearsed Marc Blitzstein's political opera, The Cradle Will Rock. It was originally scheduled to open June 16, 1937, in its first public preview. Because of cutbacks in the WPA projects, the premiere at the Maxine Elliott Theatre was canceled. The theater was locked, and guarded, to prevent any government-purchased materials from being used for a commercial production of the work. In a last-minute move, Welles announced to ticket-holders that the show was being transferred to the Venice, 20 blocks away. Some cast, crew and audience, walked on foot. The union musicians refused to perform in a commercial theater for lower non-union government wages. The actors' union stated that the production belonged to the Federal Theatre Project, and could not be performed outside that context without permission. Lacking participation of the union members, The Cradle Will Rock began with Blitzstein introducing it and playing the piano accompaniment on stage, with some cast members performing from the audience. This impromptu performance was well received by its audience.
