Citizen Welles

Bol

A captivating and compelling encapsulation of the revered and respected artist. George Orson Welles (1915-1985) is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. At just twenty-five years old, he co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in his Academy-Award-winning debut film Citizen Kane (1941). His innovative and distinctive directorial style - nonlinear narratives, unusual camera angles, deep focus shots, and long takes - continues to be emulated by directors and cinematographers to this day. The brilliant yet provocative Welles won multiple Grammys, a Golden Globe, and the greatest honor the Directors Guild of America bestows: the D.W. Griffith Award. His final film, The Other Side of the Wind, was released in 2018, 33 years after his death. In Citizen Welles, author Frank Brady presents a comprehensive and complete picture of the artist and auteur. Painstakingly researched, Brady delves into Welles's creative achievements, from his critically acclaimed film Citizen Kane and his controversial radio broadcast The War of the Worlds (1938) to his pioneering stage productions of the classics of Shakespeare, Shaw, and Ionesco; and Welles' starring turn on Broadway in Shaw's Heartbreak House (for which he made the cover of Time). Brady also explores other notable films, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Touch of Evil (1958), and Chimes at Midnight (1965). This all-encompassing work also details the personal side of Welles's life, including his romances with Rita Hayworth and Dolores Del Rio and the confounding tragedy of his final years. Presented is a captivating and compelling encapsulation of the revered and respected artist.

Bol Partner

A decade in the research and writing, biographer Frank Brady's Citizen Welles is the first comprehensive life story, definitive for our time, of Orson Welles through to his death in 1985. Welles's influence on several generations of American filmmakers, from Kubrick to Spielberg, for example, is incalculable. Welles's creative achievements, from the best known --- his all-time great movie Citizen Kane and his notorious radio show The War of the Worlds --- to his pioneering presentations in the popular theater of the classics of Shakespeare, Shaw, Ionesco, and his stardom as an actor are at the heart of Brady's biography. But Brady tells, too, the more personal side of Welle's life, such as his amours with Rita Hayworth and Dolores Del Rio and the confounding tragedy of Welles's sad final years, in part, Brady shows, the consequences of tee early success. The young Welles toured with Katherine Cornell; starred on Broadway in Shaw's Heartbreak House, when he made the cover of Time; acted in Hamlet in the Gate Theatre in Dublin. His films such as The Magnificent Ambersons, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight (his Falstaff may well be the greatest of all Falstaffs) were among the best of all time. Brady clarifies the whys and wherefores of Welles's extraordinary success and his end, when Welles was uniformly rejected by Hollywood as a noncommercial iconoclast. The great continuing popular interest in posthumous Orson Welles is vivid evidence of the shortsightedness of that view.