The stars (1962)

ORSON WELLES The last typhoon Welles directed his wife, Rita Hayworth, in The Lady from Shanghai (1948). Kenneth Tynan once remarked that Orson Welles was "a superb bravura director, a fair bravura actor, and a limited bravura writer; but an incomparable bravura personality." Which is a fair bravura summary of the man. He came to the movies out of the theater, which he had come to after years of youthful wandering. The only prosaic thing about him was the place of his birth — Kenosha, Wisconsin. His mother was an aesthete, and his father was a sometime inventor who liked to hang around the lower levels of show business — with magicians, vaudevillians, ham actors of gaslight melodrama. His parents separated, and Welles spent his childhood first traveling with his mother, and after she died, drifting with his father. From her he acquired his taste for the finer things; from him he got his passion for the cruder forms of theatricality. His father died when Orson was fourteen; then, quitting school, he began to weave together the two disparate strands of his heritage. He traveled in the inconvenient ways a young man in search of himself adopts. He worked briefly at Dublin's Gate Theater, fought bulls in Spain, got his first American acting job with Katharine Cornell in Romeo and Juliet, then, in the depths of the depression, still in his early twenties, he went to work for the WPA's Federal Theater Project. There quickly followed the famous Mercury Theater and his celebrated radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, the furor over which quite overshadowed the valuable and exciting work he and his little troupe were doing in the barely living theater. Now a public figure, he Welles in the title role of his directorial masterpiece, Citizen Kane. 179