1915 - 1985 (70 years)
Has 32 ancestors and one descendant in this family tree.
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
Birth |
6 May 1915 |
Died |
9 Oct 1985 |
|
Father |
Richard H. Welles, b. 1873 |
Mother |
Beatrice Ives, b. 1882 |
|
Family 1 |
Virginia Nicholson |
|
Family 2 |
Rita Hayworth, b. 17 Oct 1918, Nursery and Child's Hospital, New York, USA |
Married |
7 Sep 1943 |
Divorced |
1 Dec 1948 |
Children |
|
|
Family 3 |
Paola Mori |
|
- Yes, date unknown
Died |
Yes, date unknown |
|
Family |
George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
|
1918 - 1987 (68 years)
Birth |
17 Oct 1918 |
Nursery and Child's Hospital, New York, USA |
Died |
14 May 1987 |
Manhattan |
|
Father |
Eduardo Cansino |
Mother |
Volga Hayworth |
|
Family 1 |
Edward Charles Judson, b. 1896, San Jose |
Married |
29 May 1937 |
Divorced |
24 May 1943 |
|
Family 2 |
George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
Married |
7 Sep 1943 |
Divorced |
1 Dec 1948 |
Children |
|
|
Family 3 |
Prince Aly Salomone Shah, b. 13 Jun 1911, Torino, Piemonte, Italia |
Married |
27 May 1949 |
Divorced |
26 Jan 1953 |
Children |
|
|
Family 4 |
Count Jose Maria Villapadierna |
|
Family 5 |
Dick Haymes, b. 13 Sep 1916, Buenos Aires, Argentina |
Married |
24 Sep 1953 |
Divorced |
Dec 1955 |
|
Family 6 |
James Hill |
Married |
2 Feb 1958 |
Divorced |
1961 |
|
Family 7 |
Gary Merrill |
|
- Yes, date unknown
Died |
Yes, date unknown |
|
Family |
George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
|
1873 - 1930 (57 years)
Birth |
1873 |
Died |
1930 |
|
Father |
Richard Jones Welles |
Mother |
Mary Blanche Head, b. 1847 |
|
Family |
Beatrice Ives, b. 1882 |
Children |
+ | 1. George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
|
|
1882 - 1924 (42 years)
Birth |
1882 |
Died |
May 1924 |
|
Family |
Richard H. Welles, b. 1873 |
Children |
+ | 1. George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
|
|
- Yes, date unknown
Died |
Yes, date unknown |
|
Family |
George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
|
1918 - 1987 (68 years)
Birth |
17 Oct 1918 |
Nursery and Child's Hospital, New York, USA |
Died |
14 May 1987 |
Manhattan |
|
Father |
Eduardo Cansino |
Mother |
Volga Hayworth |
|
Family 1 |
Edward Charles Judson, b. 1896, San Jose |
Married |
29 May 1937 |
Divorced |
24 May 1943 |
|
Family 2 |
George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
Married |
7 Sep 1943 |
Divorced |
1 Dec 1948 |
Children |
|
|
Family 3 |
Prince Aly Salomone Shah, b. 13 Jun 1911, Torino, Piemonte, Italia |
Married |
27 May 1949 |
Divorced |
26 Jan 1953 |
Children |
|
|
Family 4 |
Count Jose Maria Villapadierna |
|
Family 5 |
Dick Haymes, b. 13 Sep 1916, Buenos Aires, Argentina |
Married |
24 Sep 1953 |
Divorced |
Dec 1955 |
|
Family 6 |
James Hill |
Married |
2 Feb 1958 |
Divorced |
1961 |
|
Family 7 |
Gary Merrill |
|
|
Father |
George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
Mother |
Rita Hayworth, b. 17 Oct 1918, Nursery and Child's Hospital, New York, USA |
Married |
7 Sep 1943 |
Divorced |
1 Dec 1948 |
|
- Yes, date unknown
Died |
Yes, date unknown |
|
Family |
George Orson Welles, b. 6 May 1915 |
|
-
Name |
George Orson Welles |
Birth |
6 May 1915 |
Gender |
Male |
Prominent People |
USA |
Filmdirector, dick |
Death |
9 Oct 1985 |
Person ID |
I296065 |
Geneagraphie |
Links To |
This person is also Orson Welles at Wikipedia |
Last Modified |
9 Sep 2001 |
Family 2 |
Rita Hayworth, b. 17 Oct 1918, Nursery and Child's Hospital, New York, USA d. 14 May 1987, Manhattan (Age 68 years) |
Marriage |
7 Sep 1943 |
Divorce |
1 Dec 1948 |
Children |
|
Family ID |
F118934 |
Group Sheet | Family Chart |
Last Modified |
9 Sep 2001 |
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Notes |
- Actor, director, producer and writer for radio, stage and film (including War of the Worlds, Native Son and Citizen Kane).
Orson Welles's pioneering, influential cinema was imaginative, ambitious and technically daring. His baroque cinematic style created a dense moral universe in which every action had tangled—and usually tragic—human repercussions. Before his dramatic arrival in Hollywood, Welles had carved a considerable reputation in theater and radio. At 18 he was a successful actor at the experimental Gate Theatre in Ireland; at 19, he made his Broadway debut as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet. A series of collaborations with director/producer John Houseman led to their participation in the New York Federal Theatre Project. Their first great success was Welles's staging of an all-black "voodoo" Macbeth, which demonstrated Welles's penchant for stretching existing forms beyond established limits. Welles and Houseman eventually formed their own repertory
company, the Mercury Theatre, enjoying success with their 1937 production of Julius
Caesar, which Welles rewrote and set in contemporary Fascist Italy.
Soon Welles was also directing the Mercury players in weekly, hour-long radio dramas
for CBS. Once again he stretched the medium, exploiting radio's intimacy to heighten
narrative immediacy, most notoriously with the Halloween 1938 broadcast of H.G. Wells's
War of the Worlds. Concocted news bulletins and eyewitness accounts were so
authentic in "reporting" the landing of hostile Martians in New Jersey that the broadcast
caused a panic among unsuspecting listeners. Seeking to capitalize on Welles's
notoriety, RKO brought him to Hollywood to produce, direct, write and act in two films
for $225,000 plus total creative freedom and a percentage of the profits. It was the most
generous offer a Hollywood studio had ever made to an untested filmmaker.
After several projects (among them an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness)
came to naught, the 25 year-old Welles made what is generally described as the most
stunning debut in the history of film. Initially called AMERICAN and later retitled
CITIZEN KANE, Welles's film was a bold, brash and inspired tour de force that told its
story from several different perspectives, recounting the rise and corruption of an
American tycoon, Charles Foster Kane (modeled on publishing magnate William
Randolph Hearst). With the brashness of someone new to Hollywood, Welles pushed
existing filmmaking techniques as far as they would go, creating a new and distinctive
film aesthetic.
Among the innovative elements of Welles's style exhibited in CITIZEN KANE were: 1.
composition in depth: the use of extreme deep focus cinematography to connect distant
figures in space; 2. complex mise-en-scène, in which the frame overflowed with action
and detail; 3. low-angle shots that revealed ceilings and made characters, especially
Kane, seem simultaneously dominant and trapped; 4. long takes; 5. a fluid, moving
camera that expanded the action beyond the frame and increased the importance of
off-screen space; and 6. the creative use of sound as a transition device (Thatcher
wishes a young Charles "Merry Christmas…" and completes the phrase "…and a Happy
New Year" to a grown Charles years later) and to create visual metaphors (as in the opera
montage where the image of the flickering backstage lamp combined with Susan Kane's
faint singing and a whirring noise to symbolize her imminent breakdown and subsequent
suicide attempt).
Although well received by the critics, CITIZEN KANE faced distribution and exhibition
problems exacerbated by Hearst's negative campaign, and it fared poorly at the box
office. Welles's second film for RKO, THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), an
adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel of the same name, was a more conventional, less
flamboyant film that utilized many of the same techniques Welles had developed for
KANE to evoke a richly textured recollection of turn-of-the-century America. But with
Welles off to South America to shoot a semi-documentary (IT'S ALL TRUE, which was
never completed by Welles himself) jointly sponsored by RKO and the US government,
the studio severely edited the film, deleting 43 minutes. Even in its truncated form,
AMBERSONS remains a dark, compelling look at nature of wealth, class and progress in
America. Before he left for South America, Welles supervised the filming of JOURNEY
INTO FEAR (1942), whose direction is credited to Norman Foster. Welles co-starred and
co-wrote the screenplay with Joseph Cotten; the result was an intriguing but muddled
thriller. When AMBERSONS proved a commercial failure, it was a blow from which
Welles's reputation would never recover. Welles and the Mercury Players were
dismissed from RKO. THE STRANGER (1946), produced by independent Sam Spiegel,
had Welles directing himself as a Nazi war criminal hiding in a small town, but it was
devoid of the characteristic Welles touch. He regained his filmmaking flair with THE
LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948), a stunning film noir in which Welles and his wife Rita
Hayworth co-starred. (Already separated before the collaboration began, she filed for
divorce once filming was completed.) The hall-of-mirrors finale is a superb example of
Welles's gift for the audacious visual image.
Welles's next film proved to be the first of an informal, impressive Shakespeare trilogy, an
eccentric, atmospheric version of MACBETH (1948) in which the actors were encouraged
to speak with thick Scottish burrs. Its centerpiece—a sequence that begins with
Macbeth's decision to kill the king, includes the murder and ends with the discovery of
the crime by Macduff—was captured in a single ten-minute take. The film, however, was
not successful and was dismissed at the Venice Film Festival. Four years later, he
answered his critics with a striking version of OTHELLO (1952), which won the Grand Prix
at Cannes. The final film in the trilogy was the triumphant CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT
(1966)/FALSTAFF which Welles, who by this time was of the correct girth to play
Falstaff, fashioned from five of Shakespeare's historical plays. As a separate narrative,
Falstaff's tale is a bitter one of deteriorating friendship passing from privilege to neglect.
It ranks among Welles's greatest achievements.
After the failure of MACBETH, Welles began a self-imposed, ten-year exile from
Hollywood. His follow-up to OTHELLO, MR. ARKADIN (1955)/CONFIDENTIAL
REPORT, was an acerbic profile of a powerful man that showed signs of the brilliance
that marked KANE, but was hindered by an episodic narrative and spotty acting. Welles
returned to Hollywood to act in and direct TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), a film noir
masterpiece. From its stunning long-take opening of a car bombing to its tragic
denouement, it reiterated his overarching vision of the world as an exacting moral
network where each human act has endless and unforseen moral consequences. His
adaptation of Kafka's novel of the same name, THE TRIAL (1963), a nightmarish
extension of that vision, depicted a society completely devoid of a moral sense, where
empty procedure replaced principle. THE IMMORTAL STORY (1968) was a satisfying,
minor work made for French televison, an adaptation of an Isak Dinesen story. His final
completed film, F FOR FAKE (1973), a diverting collage of documentary and staged
footage that investigated the line separating reality and illusion, celebrated all
tricksters—including its director, who sometimes stated that if he had not become a
director, he would have been a magician.
At the time of his death, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, a project he had begun
filming in the 1970s, remained unfinished. Obviously autobiographical, it was the story of
a famous filmmaker (played by Welles's good friend, John Huston) struggling to find
financing for his film, just as Welles was forced to do many times. As an unseen
fragment, it was a sad and ironic end for a filmmaking maverick who set the standards for
the modern narrative film and the man who was, in the words of Martin Scorsese,
"responsible for inspiring more people to be film directors than anyone else in history of
the cinema."
- Baseline Film Enciclopaedia.
His Life.
Born George Orson Welles in Kenosha, Wisconsin, from Beatrice Ives Welles and
Richard Head Welles en in the heart of a middle-class family; from his mother he inherited
her musical talent which he displayed at the early age of five. Beatrice Welles died when
she was fourty three being Welles only nine, this could mark him (although he always
denied it) influencing his cinematographic work, more concretely characters like Mrs.
Kane in Citizen Kane and Fanny Minafer in The Magnificient Ambersons, played both
by Agnes Moorehead, and specially Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) and George
Amberson (Tim Holt), his alleged alter-ego, in The Magnificient Ambersons. His first
theatrical production ("Doctor Jekyll y Mr. Hyde") was directed, adapted and played by
him when he was only 10, in Camp Indianola. The year after, 1926, a local paper publishes
an article titled: "Ten year-old cartoonist, actor and poet" ;that same year he enters Todd
School in Woodstock which headmaster will be in the future a great influence to young
Welles. In this years his local theatrical "productions" for the school and womens' clubs
are continous. In 1930 his father passes away. A year later Welles goes to Ireland where
he plans to live from his drawings, there he enters a theatre company where he becomes
profesional actor. In 1933 goes back to United States and later this year he travels to
Spain where he lives writing noir tales for magazines in Seville and practices the art of
bullfighting under the name of: "El Americano", fortunately he gives up that vocation
due to his mediocrity. He comes back to New York where he start working in the theatre,
the year after he starts his work in the radio, first anonimously, then in 1936 he joins
permanently "The March of Time" (parodied in Citizen Kane), this year he opens his first
own profesional theatrical production: a version of Macbeth with the an entirely black
cast; from then his productions are constant and in 1937 he starts the radio series "The
Shadow" which would be his first projection to popularity. That year has a capital
importance in Welles life because along with John Houseman they found the Mercury
Theatre formed among others by Joseph Cotten, George Colouris, Vincent Price (briefly
in their begginings), Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane,... their first production was
Caesar based in Julius Caesar by Shakespeare and numerous others (The Shoemaker's
Holiday, Heartbreak House, Danton's Death,...) and radio broadcasts like The War Of The
Worlds, The Magnificient Ambersons, Jane Eyre, Dracula, Rebecca, The Pickwick
Papers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Heart of Darkness. Because of the
notoriety of the first RKO offers him a contract in 1939 to film two movies as director,
producer and screenwriter with total artiscic freedom. In 1940 he starts the shooting of
Citizen Kane with nearly the whole buch of the Mercury Theatre but he never leaves his
continous theatrical productions. In 1943 during World War II and back from Brazi after
the It's All True flop, the Mercury Theatre offers a touring variety show for the americal
soldiers, aside from the habituals Welles, Cotten and Moorehead also joined the Mercury
Marlene Dietrich (who was sawed in two by Welles) and briefly Rita Hayworth, marrying
later Orson Welles and divorcing from him in 1947 after the shooting of The Lady From
Shangai. In 1949 Welles emigrates to Europe where he spends the following three years
working as an actor in other filmes to finance Othello, one of them would be the film that
will make to rise even more the Welles myth: The Third Man, from 1951 he starts playing
and frequently writting a radio series of 39 episodes based in his character in that film:
the infamous Harry Lime. From one of that scripts will rise the plot of one of his better
films, Mr. Arkadin, which will make Orson Welles to stablish a home in Madrid. In 1955
he gets married for third time, in this ocasion to Paola Mori who also played a important
role in Mr. Arkadin. In 1957 he comes back to Hollywood to film a new movie: Touch Of
Evil but the film has no box-office success and he isn't able to make other film in United
States until The Other Side of the Wind, which he will never be able to open. Orson
Welles dies due to a heart attack on october 10, 1985 while he was typing some scene
instructions for the material he intended to shoot later that day with Gary Graver, his
habitual cinematographer in the last period of his life, for The Magic Show for UCLA
University. His ashes are buried in Spain in a estate in the town of Ronda, Malaga, where
he spent a summer when he was eighteen.
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