56 Fun Facts About Orson Welles

In which Wisconsin city was Orson Welles born on May 6, 1915?

Kenosha was home for only four years. His family then moved to Chicago, where he grew up among the musicians who gathered around his mother, a concert pianist.

In Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, the Martians first land in which US state?

New Jersey: the script set the landing on a farm at Grovers Mill and told it as breaking news bulletins. Some listeners who tuned in late took the invasion for the real thing.

In Citizen Kane, the dying tycoon's last word, 'Rosebud', turns out to be the name of what?

His childhood sled, which he was playing with in the snow on the day he was sent away from his parents. Nobody in the film ever finds out: only the audience sees the name as the sled burns.

At which boarding school did the young Welles come under the influence of teacher Roger Hill?

Todd Seminary for Boys gave him nearly all the formal schooling he ever had. He spent five years there staging and acting in plays, then skipped college to travel.

Which town did Welles name as 'home' in a 1960 interview?

Woodstock, Illinois, 'if it's anywhere,' he said, because he had gone to school there. He came back at 19 to direct a six-week summer theatre festival at its Opera House.

At which Dublin playhouse did the 16-year-old Welles debut in 1931 by claiming to be a Broadway star?

The Gate cast him as a duke in Jew Süss that October and kept giving him featured parts. Within months he had also acted at the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre.

What was the title of the schoolbook series on Shakespeare's plays that Welles co-edited in the early 1930s?

Everybody's Shakespeare, co-edited with his old headmaster, cut the plays to acting length so that students would stage them. It sold for many years and was later renamed The Mercury Shakespeare.

Which actress's touring repertory company gave Welles his first professional stage work in America in 1933?

Katharine Cornell took him on after Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott made the introductions. He toured the country with her company and reached Broadway at 19 as Tybalt in her Romeo and Juliet.

What was Welles's first film, an eight-minute short he co-directed with a friend at 19?

The Hearts of Age was a silent short made with his friend William Vance. It sat forgotten until a film scholar found Vance's print in a Connecticut public library in the 1960s.

What nickname did Welles's 1936 all-Black production of the Scottish play get?

Voodoo Macbeth moved the play from Scotland to a Haiti-like island and turned its witchcraft into voodoo. It opened at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre in April 1936, when its director was 20.

What is the name of Charles Foster Kane's vast Florida estate in Citizen Kane?

Xanadu stands on a man-made mountain on Florida's Gulf Coast, with its own zoo and an art collection too big to catalogue. Kane ends his days there nearly alone after his second wife walks out.

Which Marc Blitzstein opera did Welles's company perform impromptu after the government locked the theatre in 1937?

The Cradle Will Rock went on that night at a hired theatre some 20 blocks away. Forbidden to appear on stage, the cast sang from seats in the audience while Blitzstein played a piano on stage.

With whom did Welles found the Mercury Theatre in 1937?

John Houseman, the producer who had given him his first New York lead two years earlier, managed the company while his partner directed. They fell out in Hollywood, and the partnership ended in 1941.

Which Shakespeare play did the Mercury Theatre open with in 1937, staged in modern dress as an anti-fascist drama?

Julius Caesar, retitled Caesar, was a smash hit that made the new company's name. Its 22-year-old director also played Brutus, the conspirator who kills the dictator.

Which radio crime-fighter did Welles play on Mutual from 1937 to 1938?

The Shadow, a crime-fighter who could make himself invisible, made the 22-year-old's deep voice familiar to millions. That was a year before his Martian broadcast made his name.

Which composer wrote and conducted the original music for The Mercury Theatre on the Air?

Bernard Herrmann followed his radio boss to Hollywood and wrote his first film score for Citizen Kane. It was Oscar-nominated but lost to his own music for The Devil and Daniel Webster.

Which sponsor picked up The Mercury Theatre on the Air after War of the Worlds, renaming it?

Campbell Soup signed on as a direct result of the headlines the Martian broadcast made; until then the show had no sponsor. The cost was less freedom over which stories to adapt.

Which dictator disparagingly mentioned the War of the Worlds panic in a speech?

Adolf Hitler alluded to it in a Munich speech days later. Research since then suggests few listeners truly panicked and that newspapers played the story up.

Which studio gave Welles the famous 1939 contract with final cut?

RKO gave a 24-year-old who had never made a feature total creative control over two films, unheard-of terms for a newcomer. The first film he made under the deal was Citizen Kane.

Three days after his 23rd birthday, Welles appeared in old-age stage makeup on the cover of which magazine?

Time ran the cover on May 9, 1938, with the 23-year-old made up as Captain Shotover, the octogenarian of Shaw's Heartbreak House. He was directing and starring on Broadway while acting on radio.

Which newspaper baron barred all mention of Citizen Kane from his papers and tried to have it suppressed?

William Randolph Hearst was the obvious model for Kane, and his chain would neither review nor advertise the film. Rival studio heads even offered to buy it outright so that every print could be destroyed.

Of its nine Academy Award nominations, Citizen Kane won only which award?

Best Original Screenplay was the film's only win, shared with Herman Mankiewicz. Best Picture and Best Director both went to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley.

Which Welles film lost over 40 minutes while he was in Brazil?

The Magnificent Ambersons was cut to 88 minutes. Its director disowned the release version, and the episode left him with a lasting name in Hollywood as a risk to finance.

What was Welles's unfinished Latin American omnibus film for the Good Neighbor policy titled?

It's All True took him to Brazil when Washington asked him to film Rio's Carnival as a goodwill gesture to Latin America. His studio withdrew its backing after a change of management, and he never finished it.

Which Hollywood star became Welles's second wife in 1943?

Rita Hayworth, Hollywood's 'love goddess', had a daughter with him, Rebecca. When he directed her in The Lady from Shanghai they were already estranged, and they divorced soon after.

Welles starred opposite Joan Fontaine in the 1943 film of which Brontë novel?

Jane Eyre cast him as the brooding Edward Rochester. It was the first of many acting jobs he took in other directors' films to pay for projects of his own.

Which 1946 thriller about a fugitive Nazi did better at the box office on release than any other film Welles directed?

The Stranger came in under budget and a day early, his bid to show Hollywood he could be trusted with a film. It was also the first Hollywood feature to include documentary footage of the Nazi camps.

Welles made The Lady from Shanghai to repay Harry Cohn for bailing out which of his stage shows?

Around the World, his Jules Verne musical with Cole Porter songs, lost its producer, so he paid for it himself and ran out of cash. It closed after 75 performances and left him years of debt.

The famous closing shootout of The Lady from Shanghai takes place where?

A hall of mirrors in an empty funhouse, where the bullets shatter one reflection after another. The studio cut about an hour from the film, including most of the funhouse scenes that led up to it.

Which studio let Welles direct a low-budget Macbeth in 1948?

Republic Pictures, a home of cheap westerns, let him shoot it in 23 days. Two years later the studio had him cut two reels and re-record the actors without their Scottish accents.

In The Third Man, Welles's Harry Lime delivers his 'cuckoo clock' speech at which Vienna landmark?

The Prater Ferris wheel, the Riesenrad, gives Lime his view of the people below as 'dots'. The film's screenwriter said its star added the cuckoo-clock lines himself during the shoot.

Who scripted The Third Man, in which Welles plays Harry Lime?

Graham Greene first wrote the story as a novella, meant only as raw material for the script and never for readers. It was published anyway after the film came out.

Which Shakespeare film by Welles, shot in stops and starts over three years, shared the top prize at Cannes in 1952?

Othello was shot in Morocco and Italy in bursts, stopping whenever its director ran out of money and left to act in other people's films. It shared the prize with an Italian film, Two Cents Worth of Hope.

Citizen Kane topped Sight and Sound's greatest-films poll for fifty years until which Hitchcock film displaced it in 2012?

Vertigo beat it by 34 votes among the 846 critics polled in 2012. Ten years later both were overtaken by Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.

Which star urged Universal to let Welles direct the 1958 border thriller he had been hired only to act in?

Charlton Heston, fresh from The Ten Commandments, asked who was directing and suggested the man cast as the villain. The shoot ran smoothly, but the studio then recut the result against its director's wishes.

Who played the lead in Welles's 1962 adaptation of Kafka's The Trial?

Anthony Perkins, fresh from Psycho, played Kafka's accused clerk. When the money for sets fell through, the interiors were shot in the empty Gare d'Orsay railway station in Paris.

Whom did Welles meet filming The Trial, later his partner and collaborator for 20 years?

He gave her a letter he had written and kept for four years when they met again.

Welles's F for Fake features the writer Clifford Irving, exposed for faking the autobiography of which billionaire?

Howard Hughes denounced the book, and Irving went to prison for the hoax. Before it, Irving had written the life of the film's other subject, the art forger Elmyr de Hory, under the title Fake!

Which company finally released Welles's long-unfinished The Other Side of the Wind in 2018?

Netflix released it after a team that included some of the original crew finished editing footage shot between 1970 and 1976. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, more than 40 years late.

Which director stars in The Other Side of the Wind as the ageing filmmaker Jake Hannaford?

John Huston began filming years into the shoot, after Welles had shot other actors' halves of Hannaford's conversations. Huston then supplied his side, playing an old director Welles likened to Ernest Hemingway.

What catchphrase did Welles intone as spokesman for Paul Masson Vineyards?

'We will sell no wine before its time.' The line fronted the winery's television ads from the late 1970s, and a leaked outtake of him slurring his way through one shoot became widely circulated and much parodied.

Welles's notorious outtake reel from a British TV advert is named after which product?

Frozen peas, for Findus: the January 1970 script was about a pea farm in Lincolnshire, and he was soon telling the director his notes made no sense. The tape moves on to fish fingers and beefburgers, with more grumbling.

Welles voiced which unseen character in the early years of Magnum, P.I.?

Robin Masters is the novelist who owns the Hawaiian estate where Magnum lives. After the actor's death, the show had Magnum come to suspect that Higgins had been Masters all along.

In The Transformers: The Movie (1986), which villain did Welles voice days before his death?

Unicron is a robot the size of a planet that devours other worlds. The film flopped on release and drew poor reviews, then won a cult following over the years.

On whose talk show did Welles give his last interview, hours before he died in October 1985?

Merv Griffin had him looking back over his life and career. He went home to Hollywood afterwards and died of a heart attack within hours.

In which country were Welles's ashes buried, in a dry well on a bullfighter friend's ranch?

Spain: the well is on the Ronda ranch of matador Antonio Ordóñez, a friend of many years. His youngest daughter says the family passed over his birthplace and Hollywood because he never felt he belonged in either.

Which Black veteran's beating by a Southern police chief did Welles denounce week after week on his 1946 radio show?

Isaac Woodard, still in uniform, was pulled off a bus hours after his discharge and blinded by the beating. The outcry helped move President Truman to desegregate the armed forces two years later.

Which classic novel did Welles start filming in 1955 and keep returning to for the rest of his life without finishing?

Don Quixote was shot in bursts over nearly two decades. He went on reworking it after both his lead actors had died, and it was still unfinished at his own death in 1985.

Welles played Cardinal Wolsey in which 1966 film?

A Man for All Seasons won six Oscars, including Best Picture. His Wolsey is first seen in a late-night attempt to bully Thomas More into backing the king's divorce.

On which 1950s sitcom did Welles guest-star as himself and perform his magic act?

I Love Lucy built the 1956 episode on a mix-up: Lucy expects to play Shakespeare with the great actor, but he only wants an assistant for his magic act. Her studio, Desilu, was then producing a TV pilot of his.

Which actor did Welles give the starring role in his 1936 farce Horse Eats Hat?

Joseph Cotten became a close friend and a mainstay of the Mercury company. He went on to play Kane's best friend in Citizen Kane and the man hunting Harry Lime in The Third Man.

Which later Hollywood star was a member of Welles's Mercury Theatre company on Broadway in 1938?

Vincent Price played in the company's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Heartbreak House, then left for Hollywood. His first film that year cast him as the leading man in a comedy, long before horror made his name.

What was the Federal Theatre Project, under which Welles staged his early hits?

A New Deal jobs program: it paid out-of-work actors, stagehands and writers to put on plays. Congress cut off its money in 1939 amid charges of Communist infiltration.

Which French artist championed Welles's Macbeth when American critics panned it?

Jean Cocteau, poet, playwright and director of Beauty and the Beast, was among its French admirers, as were the critic André Bazin and the director Robert Bresson. Its studio held the film back and had it recut.

Welles was presented with which French decoration in 1982?

The Legion of Honour was pinned on him in Paris by President François Mitterrand. On the same visit he presided over the César Awards, France's answer to the Oscars.

Which cinematographer shot Citizen Kane, pioneering its deep-focus photography with Welles?

Gregg Toland, already an Oscar winner, sought out the novice director and asked for the job. In thanks, the two men's names share a single title card at the end of the film.