Orson Welles: The Life Story Behind the Citizen Kane Genius

Orson Welles made the film that many people call the greatest film ever made, and he made it when he was twenty-five years old. That is the first fact about him, and it is also the tragedy of his life, because everything he did afterwards was measured against it. Citizen Kane is taught in film schools, argued about by critics, and watched by new generations who still find it fresh. Welles never made another film like it, and he spent the next forty years trying to make films with no money, no studio behind him, and a reputation that made producers nervous.

He was a child prodigy who could read Shakespeare before most children could read at all, and he became famous on the radio before he ever touched a film camera. He was tall, loud, brilliant, and impossible to ignore. He could act, direct, write, and speak in a voice that filled a room. He also had a gift for making enemies, for spending money he did not have, and for starting projects he could not finish. His life is the story of what happens when the world gives a young man everything at once, and then slowly takes it away.

What makes Welles worth understanding is not just Citizen Kane. It is the long second half of his life, when he acted in other people’s films to pay for his own, when he travelled from country to country looking for money, and when he kept working even though Hollywood had decided he was too difficult to trust. He never stopped believing that he could make another great film. Whether he did or not is a question people still argue about, and that argument is part of his legacy.

A Child Prodigy in Kenosha Who Lost Both Parents Young

George Orson Welles was born on 6 May 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the second son of Richard Head Welles and Beatrice Ives Welles. His father was an inventor and a businessman who had made money from a bicycle lamp and other inventions, and his mother was a talented pianist who had studied music and who loved literature. The family was comfortable, and the house was full of books, music, and talk. Orson was a remarkable child. He learned to read very young, he could recite long passages of Shakespeare, and he played the piano and the violin. People who met him as a boy said he spoke like an adult, and that he seemed older than his years.

His childhood did not stay comfortable. His parents separated when he was young, and his mother took him to Chicago, where she hoped to build a new life. She died when Orson was nine years old, and the loss changed him deeply. His father, who had been drinking heavily for years, died when Orson was fifteen, leaving him an orphan with a modest inheritance and a guardian to look after him. In six years, he had lost the two people who mattered most to him, and he had learned that the world could take things away without warning. That early loss stayed with him, and it gave his work a sadness that even his funniest films carry underneath.

He was sent to the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, a progressive school run by a headmaster named Roger Hill, who became a father figure to him. At Todd, Orson was allowed to direct plays, design sets, and act in Shakespeare, and Hill gave him freedom that most schoolboys never had. He staged Julius Caesar and other plays, and he discovered that he loved being in charge of a stage, telling actors where to stand, and shaping a story for an audience. When he left school, Hill offered to send him to university, but Orson refused. He wanted to go to Ireland and try to become an actor, and at eighteen he travelled there with little money and a great deal of confidence.

In Dublin, he walked into the Gate Theatre and told the managers that he was a famous American actor who had come to work with them. It was not true, but he said it with such confidence that they believed him, or at least they decided to give him a chance. He acted in several plays, and he learned his craft on a real stage, in front of real audiences. When he returned to America, he had a little experience, a big voice, and an even bigger belief in himself. He was nineteen years old, and he was ready to take on New York.

New York, the Mercury Theatre, and the Radio Panic

In New York, Welles found work in the theatre, and he quickly became known as a young man of extraordinary talent and energy. He acted in Shakespeare, he directed plays, and he worked with the Federal Theatre Project, a government programme that gave work to actors during the Great Depression. In 1936, he directed a version of Macbeth with an all-Black cast, set in Haiti instead of Scotland, which became famous as the “Voodoo Macbeth.” The production was a success, and it showed that Welles could take a classic play and make it feel new and urgent. He was twenty-one years old, and the theatre world was already talking about him.

In 1937, Welles and his friend John Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre, a company of young actors who wanted to make bold, modern theatre. They staged Julius Caesar in modern dress, as a play about a dictator, and the production was praised for its power and its relevance. The Mercury Theatre was not a commercial success, but it was an artistic one, and it gave Welles a group of actors who trusted him and who would follow him into radio and film. The company included actors like Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, who would work with Welles for years.

The Mercury Theatre moved into radio, with a weekly show called The Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast on the CBS network. On 30 October 1938, the night before Halloween, Welles broadcast an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, about an invasion of Earth by Martians. The programme was presented as a series of news bulletins, with actors reporting that strange objects had landed in New Jersey and that Martians were attacking. Many listeners who tuned in late believed the reports were real, and there were reports of panic, with people fleeing their homes and calling the police. The exact scale of the panic has been debated ever since, and some historians say it was exaggerated by newspapers, but there is no doubt that the broadcast made Welles famous across America. He was twenty-three years old, and he had shown that radio could be as powerful as any other art.

The War of the Worlds broadcast changed Welles’s life. Hollywood, which had been watching him, offered him a contract with RKO Pictures, a studio that gave him something no young director had ever been given: complete control over his first film. He could choose the story, the cast, and the crew, and he had the final say on the finished film. It was an extraordinary offer, and Welles accepted it. He went to Hollywood, and he began to work on the film that would define his life.

Citizen Kane and the Film That Changed Cinema

Welles chose to make a film about a rich newspaper owner who dies alone in a vast mansion, whispering a single mysterious word: “Rosebud.” The film was called Citizen Kane, and it was loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, a powerful newspaper publisher who was one of the richest men in America. Welles worked with the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, a sharp and experienced writer who knew Hollywood and its people, and together they built a story that was told in a new way, with the life of Charles Foster Kane shown through the memories of the people who had known him. The film was not told in a straight line. It jumped back and forth in time, and the audience had to piece the story together.

Welles also worked with a cameraman named Gregg Toland, who was one of the best in Hollywood, and together they invented new ways of filming. They used deep focus, which kept both the foreground and the background sharp at the same time, so that the audience could see a whole room at once. They used low camera angles, which made the ceilings visible and the characters look larger and more powerful. They used shadows and light in ways that other films had not tried. The result was a film that looked different from anything Hollywood had made before, and that is still studied today for its technique.

Citizen Kane opened in 1941, and it was praised by critics, but it was not a commercial success. Hearst, who believed the film was an attack on him, used his newspapers to attack it, and he pressured cinemas not to show it. The film earned some money, but not much, and it was soon forgotten by the public. Welles was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor and for Best Director, and he won the award for Best Original Screenplay, which he shared with Mankiewicz. The award was small comfort. He had made a masterpiece, and the studio had lost money on it, and the industry had learned that giving a young man complete control was a risk.

In the years that followed, Citizen Kane’s reputation grew. Critics and filmmakers began to call it the greatest film ever made, and film schools began to teach it as a model of what cinema could do. Welles, who was still a young man, found that his first film had become a standard that he could never escape. Everything he made afterwards would be compared to it, and everything would be found wanting. That is a heavy burden for any artist, and it shaped the rest of his career.

The Magnificent Ambersons and the Loss of Control

Welles’s second film was The Magnificent Ambersons, based on a novel by Booth Tarkington about a wealthy family in decline. Welles made the film in 1942, and he believed it was better than Citizen Kane. He shot it with care, and he built a story about pride, change, and the loss of a way of life. But while he was in South America, working on another project for the American government, the studio took the film away from him. RKO cut nearly an hour from the film, reshot the ending, and released a shorter version that Welles had never approved. He was furious, and he never forgave the studio. The missing footage was destroyed, and it has never been found.

The loss of The Magnificent Ambersons was a turning point. Welles had been given complete control for his first film, and he had lost it for his second. He would never have that kind of control again in Hollywood. The studios had learned their lesson: Welles was a genius, but he was also expensive, slow, and difficult to manage, and they were not willing to take the risk. From then on, Welles would have to fight for every film he made, and he would have to find money in other ways.

He tried to make films in the 1940s, including The Stranger in 1946, a thriller about a Nazi war criminal hiding in a small American town, and The Lady from Shanghai in 1947, a dark and stylish film starring his then-wife, the actress Rita Hayworth. Both films were made with studio money, but both were cut and changed by the studios, and neither was the film Welles had wanted to make. The Lady from Shanghai, in particular, was a film he cared about deeply, and he was disappointed by what was released. He began to understand that Hollywood would never let him work the way he wanted to work, and he began to look elsewhere.

In 1948, Welles left Hollywood and went to Europe, where he hoped to find more freedom. He acted in other people’s films to earn money, and he used that money to pay for his own projects. He made Othello in the early 1950s, filming it over several years in Italy and Morocco, stopping whenever the money ran out and starting again when he had earned more. The film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952, but it was a hard way to work, and it left Welles exhausted. He was a man who had once had a whole studio behind him, and now he was begging for money from anyone who would listen.

Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, and the Years of Exile

In 1958, Welles was given a chance to direct a film in Hollywood again. The film was Touch of Evil, a crime story set on the border between the United States and Mexico, starring Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh. Welles acted in the film as well, playing a corrupt police captain, and he made a film that was dark, strange, and brilliant. The opening shot of the film, which follows a car with a bomb in it through the streets of a border town without a single cut, is still studied today as one of the great shots in cinema. But the studio cut the film again, and Welles wrote a long memo asking for changes, which was ignored. The film was released in a version he did not approve, and it was not a success in America. Years later, a restored version was made following his memo, and it was praised as a masterpiece.

Welles spent the 1960s in Europe, acting in films to earn money and trying to make his own films whenever he could. His most personal project of this period was Chimes at Midnight, released in 1965, a film about Sir John Falstaff, the fat and funny knight from Shakespeare’s plays about King Henry IV. Welles had played Falstaff on stage for years, and he loved the character, who was a liar, a thief, and a man who loved life more than anyone else in the plays. The film was made with little money, and it was difficult to make, but it is now regarded as one of Welles’s best films, and as one of the great Shakespeare films ever made.

He also worked on a film called The Trial, based on the novel by Franz Kafka, and on a film called F for Fake, a playful documentary about art forgery that was released in 1973. F for Fake was a strange and funny film, and it showed that Welles still had a sense of humour about his own reputation. He presented himself as a magician, performing tricks for the camera, and he told the audience that everything they were seeing might be a lie. It was a fitting film for a man whose life had been full of tricks, promises, and unfinished projects.

But the great unfinished project of his later life was Don Quixote, a film he worked on for decades, filming in Spain and Mexico whenever he had money and actors available. He never finished it. He also worked on a film called The Other Side of the Wind, about an ageing film director trying to make a comeback, which he shot in the 1970s but never completed. The film was finally finished and released in 2018, more than thirty years after his death, and it was praised, but it was not the film Welles had wanted to make. His life was full of films that existed only in pieces, and that is one of the saddest things about him.

Acting for Money, the Wine Commercials, and the Last Years

To pay for his films, Welles acted in a great many films that he did not care about. He played villains, kings, and authority figures, and he was often the best thing in a bad film. He acted in The Third Man in 1949, a film directed by Carol Reed, in which he played Harry Lime, a charming criminal who has faked his own death. His entrance in that film, stepping out of a dark doorway into the light, is one of the most famous entrances in cinema, and his performance is still praised today. He did not direct the film, but he made it his own, and it reminded audiences of what he could do as an actor.

In his later years, Welles became a familiar voice on radio and television, and he did voice work for cartoons and commercials. He became known to a new generation for a series of wine commercials, in which he spoke in his deep voice about the quality of the wine. The commercials were mocked by some people, who thought it was sad that a great director was selling wine on television, but Welles did not seem to mind. He needed the money, and he enjoyed performing, even in a commercial. He also appeared on talk shows, where he told stories, performed magic tricks, and charmed the audience with his wit.

He lived in Las Vegas and in Los Angeles in his final years, and he worked on a one-man stage show about his life and career. He was a large man by then, and his health was not good, but he kept working, kept writing, and kept talking about the films he still wanted to make. He died on 10 October 1985, in Los Angeles, at the age of seventy. He had been working on a film script the day before he died. His death was reported around the world, and the newspapers called him a genius, a prodigy, and a man who had changed cinema. They were right, but they were also late. He had been a genius for fifty years, and the world had only remembered it when he was gone.

What Citizen Kane Changed and Why Welles Still Matters

Citizen Kane changed the way films were made. Before it, most Hollywood films told their stories in a straight line, with the camera placed at eye level and the lighting kept bright and clear. After it, directors began to experiment with time, with camera angles, with deep focus, and with stories that asked the audience to think. The film’s influence can be seen in the work of directors who came after Welles, from the French New Wave to the American films of the 1970s, and its techniques are still taught in film schools today. Welles did not invent all of those techniques himself, but he brought them together in a single film, and he showed what they could do.

Welles also changed the idea of what a director could be. Before him, directors were often seen as craftsmen who worked for the studio, following orders and making films on a schedule. Welles showed that a director could be an author, a person with a vision who shaped every part of a film. That idea, which is now called the auteur theory, owes a great deal to Welles, even though he himself was often at war with the studios that employed him. He was the first director to be treated as a star in his own right, and that changed the way the industry thought about directors.

His radio work mattered too. The War of the Worlds broadcast showed that a story could be told in a way that made people believe it was real, and it raised questions about the power of the media that are still relevant today. In a world of social media and fake news, the lessons of that broadcast are more important than ever. Welles understood that people believe what they hear when it sounds like the news, and that a good storyteller can make the unreal feel real. That is a power that must be used with care, and Welles learned that the hard way.

Today, Welles is remembered as one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, and his films are watched, studied, and argued about by people who were not born when he died. Citizen Kane is still at the top of many lists of the greatest films, and his other films, like Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, are now recognised as masterpieces. The unfinished films, the lost footage, and the projects that never happened are part of his legend too, and they remind us that genius is not enough on its own. A great artist also needs money, time, and people who trust him, and Welles lost those things early. His life is a warning as well as an inspiration, and that is why it still matters.

My Take:

When I think about Orson Welles, the first feeling I have is not admiration. It is sadness. Here was a man who had everything a young artist could want: talent, fame, money, and the freedom to make any film he liked. He used it once, brilliantly, and then he spent the rest of his life trying to get it back. That is a sad story, and I think it is sadder than the story of a man who never had a chance at all, because Welles knew exactly what he had lost. He had held it in his hands, and he had watched it slip away, and he never stopped reaching for it. I find that heartbreaking, and I also find it deeply human, because most of us have lost something we wanted to keep, even if it was smaller than a film studio.

What I admire most about him is the sheer size of his talent. I do not use that word lightly. Welles could act, direct, write, and speak, and he could do all of them at a level that few people reach in even one. He read Shakespeare as a child. He directed Macbeth at twenty-one. He made Citizen Kane at twenty-five. Those are not the achievements of a lucky man. They are the achievements of a person whose mind worked faster and deeper than the minds around him. I think about what it must have been like to be in a room with him, listening to him talk about a play or a film, and I imagine it was both thrilling and exhausting, because he never stopped, and he never slowed down for anyone else. That kind of brilliance is rare, and it is worth celebrating, even when the person who has it is difficult to work with.

But I also think his brilliance was part of his problem. He was so talented, and so confident, that he did not learn how to work with other people. He wanted complete control, and when he got it, he made a masterpiece. When he lost it, he did not know how to compromise. He fought with studios, he spent money he did not have, and he started projects he could not finish. I understand the desire for control. If you know how a film should look, it is painful to watch someone else change it. But a film is not made by one person. It is made by hundreds of people, and a director who cannot listen to them, or work within a budget, or finish on time, will soon find that no one wants to hire him. Welles learned that lesson too late, and he paid for it with forty years of struggle.

The story of The Magnificent Ambersons stays with me more than any other part of his life. He made a film he believed was better than Citizen Kane, and the studio took it away, cut it, and destroyed the missing footage. I try to imagine how that felt. He was in South America, working on a government project, and he came home to find that his film had been changed without his permission. That is not just a professional disappointment. It is a kind of theft, and it is a wound that would be hard to forgive. I do not blame him for being angry. I blame the studio for not trusting him. But I also wonder whether Welles could have done something differently. Could he have stayed in Hollywood and fought for the film? Could he have made a shorter film that the studio would accept? I do not know, and I am not sure anyone can know. What I do know is that the loss of that film broke something in him, and he never fully recovered from it.

I think about the War of the Worlds broadcast a lot, because it is the most famous thing he ever did on the radio, and it is also the most misunderstood. Some people say it caused a panic across America. Others say the panic was exaggerated by newspapers that wanted to sell copies. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Some people were frightened, and some were not. But what matters to me is not how many people panicked. What matters is that Welles understood the power of the media, and he used it in a way that scared people. He did not mean to cause a panic. He meant to make a good radio programme. But the programme showed that a voice on the radio, speaking like a newsreader, could make people believe something that was not true. In our time, when false stories spread quickly on the internet, that lesson is more important than ever. Welles learned it by accident, and the world is still learning it today.

There is a part of me that wishes Welles had been more practical. If he had made smaller films, finished them on time, and stayed within budget, he might have made twenty good films instead of a handful of great ones and a shelf full of unfinished projects. I think about the films he never finished, Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind, and I wonder what they would have been if he had found a way to complete them. But then I think about the other side of that argument. If Welles had been practical, would he have made Citizen Kane? A practical man does not spend a studio’s money on deep focus and low camera angles and a story told backwards. A practical man makes a safe film that earns its money back. Welles was not practical, and that is why he made a masterpiece. The same quality that made him great also made him impossible to employ. That is a paradox, and I do not think there is a simple answer to it.

I also think about his later years, when he acted in films he did not care about to pay for the films he did care about. Some people see that as a sad decline, a great director reduced to playing villains in bad films and selling wine on television. I see it differently. I see a man who refused to stop working, even when the work was not what he wanted. He could have retired. He could have written his memoirs and lived quietly on his reputation. Instead, he kept acting, kept writing, kept trying to raise money for his next film. That is not a decline. That is stubbornness, and I respect stubbornness. He knew that the world had moved on, and he knew that he would probably never have the freedom he had at twenty-five, but he kept going anyway. That takes a kind of courage that is easy to miss, because it does not look like the courage of a young man making a masterpiece. It looks like an old man doing a wine commercial. But it is the same courage, and it deserves the same respect.

His performance in The Third Man is one of my favourite things about him. He did not direct that film, and he did not write it, but he walked into it and made it his own. Harry Lime is charming, funny, and completely without conscience, and Welles played him with a smile that made the audience like him even when they knew he was a criminal. That performance tells me something important about Welles as an actor: he understood that a villain who is charming is far more dangerous than a villain who is frightening, because people let a charming person get away with things. He brought that understanding to his own films too, especially Citizen Kane, where the hero is a man who is both sympathetic and cruel. Welles did not believe in simple heroes and villains. He believed in people who were both, and that is why his films still feel true.

I keep coming back to the question of what his life teaches us. I think the first lesson is about the danger of peaking too early. When you do your best work at twenty-five, the rest of your life becomes a long argument with your own past. Every new film is compared to the old one, and every failure is seen as proof that you have lost your gift. That is an unfair way to judge a person, but it is a human way, and Welles lived with it for forty years. I think the lesson for the rest of us is to be careful about defining ourselves by a single achievement, even a great one. A life is longer than one film, and a person is more than their best work.

The second lesson is about trust. Welles lost the trust of the studios, and once trust is lost, it is very hard to win back. He spent decades trying to find money, and he found it in small amounts, from people who believed in him, but never in the amounts he needed. I think about what would have happened if he had been able to work with a studio instead of against it, if he had learned to finish a film on time and within budget, and if he had been willing to let someone else have the final say. He might have made more films, and they might have been good films, but they might not have been his films. That is the trade-off, and I do not think there is a right answer. But I do think that trust matters, in film and in life, and that a person who breaks trust, even for good reasons, will pay a price for it.

The third lesson is about finishing things. Welles started many films and finished few of them, and the unfinished ones haunt his reputation. Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, and the lost footage of The Magnificent Ambersons are all reminders that a great idea is not enough. A film has to be finished, released, and seen, or it does not exist in the world. I think this is a lesson for anyone who makes things: finish the work, even if it is not perfect, because an imperfect finished film is worth more than a perfect unfinished one. Welles knew this, and he still could not do it, which tells me how hard it is. But the lesson stands, and I want to remember it.

Finally, I want to say that I am glad Citizen Kane exists, and I am glad that Welles made it when he did. It is a film that changed cinema, and it is a film that still rewards watching. But I am also glad that he kept working after it, even when the work was hard and the money was short. The later films, the acting roles, the radio shows, and even the wine commercials are all part of the same life, and they all show a man who loved to perform and to tell stories. He was not a perfect man, and he was not a practical man, but he was a remarkable one, and the world of film is richer because he was in it. When I think of him now, I do not think of the boy genius who peaked at twenty-five. I think of the old man who was still writing a script the day before he died, still believing that the next film would be the one that mattered. That belief, even when it was not rewarded, is the thing I admire most about him.

I also find myself thinking about his voice, because it is the part of him that people forget. Welles had a deep, rich voice, and he used it on radio, in films, and in commercials, and it was a voice that could make even an ordinary sentence sound important. He understood that the voice is an instrument, and he played it well. When he read the news in The War of the Worlds, people believed him, not because the story was true, but because his voice made it sound true. That is a power, and it is a responsibility, and Welles learned, perhaps too late, that a voice that can make people believe anything must be used with care. In our time, when voices on the radio and on the internet can spread false stories in minutes, that lesson is more urgent than ever, and Welles is one of the first people who taught it to us, even if he taught it by accident.

There is one more thing I want to say about his unfinished films, because they haunt me. Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind, and the lost footage of The Magnificent Ambersons are all films that exist only in pieces, or in the memories of the people who worked on them. I think about what those films might have been, and I feel a sadness that is hard to name, because it is not just sadness for Welles. It is sadness for all the art that is never finished, for all the books that are never published, and for all the ideas that die with the people who had them. Welles reminds me that finishing is part of making, and that a great idea is not enough. You have to finish the work, even when it is hard, even when the money runs out, even when no one believes in it anymore. He knew that, and he still could not always do it, which tells me how hard it is, and how much it matters to try.

Frequently Asked Questions

How old was Orson Welles when he made Citizen Kane?

Orson Welles was twenty-five years old when Citizen Kane was released in 1941, and he had already directed plays, run the Mercury Theatre, and become famous on the radio. He directed the film, acted in it as Charles Foster Kane, and shared the writing credit with Herman J. Mankiewicz. The film won him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, which he shared with Mankiewicz.

Did the War of the Worlds broadcast really cause a panic?

The broadcast of The War of the Worlds on 30 October 1938 was presented as a series of news bulletins about a Martian invasion, and many listeners who tuned in late believed the reports were real. There were reports of people fleeing their homes and calling the police, but historians have debated how widespread the panic really was, and some say newspapers exaggerated it. There is no doubt, however, that the broadcast made Welles famous across America.

Why did the studio cut The Magnificent Ambersons?

RKO Pictures cut nearly an hour from The Magnificent Ambersons while Welles was in South America working on another project, and the studio reshot the ending without his approval. The missing footage was destroyed and has never been found. Welles believed the film was better than Citizen Kane, and he never forgave the studio for changing it.

What is the famous opening shot of Touch of Evil?

Touch of Evil, released in 1958, opens with a long tracking shot that follows a car with a bomb in it through the streets of a border town, without a single cut, until the bomb explodes. The shot is still studied in film schools as one of the great shots in cinema. The studio cut the film after Welles finished it, and a restored version following his notes was released many years later.

Who was Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight and why did Welles love him?

Falstaff is Sir John Falstaff, the fat and funny knight from Shakespeare’s plays about King Henry IV, and Welles had played him on stage for years before making Chimes at Midnight in 1965. Welles loved Falstaff because he was a liar, a thief, and a man who loved life more than anyone else in the plays. The film is now regarded as one of Welles’s best works and one of the great Shakespeare films.

How did Orson Welles pay for his later films?

In his later years, Welles acted in other people’s films to earn money, and he used that money to pay for his own projects, such as Othello and Chimes at Midnight. He also did voice work, radio, television, and commercials, including a well-known series of wine commercials. He often had to stop filming when the money ran out and start again when he had earned more, which is why some of his films took years to finish and some were never finished at all.