Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show net worth is $20 Million. Also know about Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show bio, salary, height, age weight, relationship and more …

Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show Wiki Biography

George Orson Welles was born on the 6th May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin USA, and was an actor, director, producer as well as a writer. As Orson Welles, he was widely recognized for his works in theatre as well as film and radio, including the 1937 Broadway stage play “Caesar”, the legendary 1938 radio drama “The War of the Worlds” – which caused mass panic among the audience – as well as for his motion picture credits such as “Citizen Kane” (1941), “Confidential Report” (1955) and “Touch of Evil” (1958). He passed away in 1985.

Have you ever wondered how much wealth one of the greatest actors and directors of Hollywood accumulated for live? How rich would Orson Welles be today? According to sources, it is estimated that the amount of Orson Welles’ net worth, as of early 2017, would exceed the sum of $20 million, acquired through his career in the moviemaking industry which was active between 1931 and his death.

Orson was born to Beatrice Ives who was a pianist, and Richard Head Welles who was a businessman. After matriculating from the Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, he was rewarded with a Harvard scholarship, however, decided to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, but which he abandoned after only a few weeks.

Orson debuted as an actor in 1931, in Gate Theater in Dublin, Ireland, appearing in “Jew Suss” stageplay. After performing in several more Gate’s productions, he relocated to London, UK, and immediately after back to the states. In 1936 Welles joined the Federal Theatre Program for which he produced several successful performances such as “Voodoo Macbeth”, “Horse Eats Hat” and “Dr. Faustus”. However, the real breakthrough came with the Broadway production of “Caesar” in 1937, which was followed by a radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds”, a radio drama adaptation of H. G. Wells’ eponymous novel, Which caused mass panic among listeners as it was so realistic that people believed that New York City was being attacked by extraterrestrials. However, all these engagements helped Orson Welles to establish himself in the entertainment industry, and boosted the wealth that he had inherited from his father.

In 1941, Welles had another huge success with the movie drama “Citizen Kane”, in which he not only performed in the star role, but also co-wrote directed and produced. For this project, he was rewarded with the prestigious Academy Award. In 1946 he appeared in the drama noir movie “The Stranger”, after which he moved to Europe where he was cast for several Italian movies, such as “Black Magic” (1948), “The Third Man” and “Prince of Foxes”, both in 1949. Through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Welles worked alternating between Europe and the States, appearing in and directing classics such as “Confidential Report” (1955), “Touch of Evil” (1958), “Crack in the Mirror” (1960) as well as “The Trial” (1962) and “The Deep” (1967). All these achievements had a huge impact on Orson Welles‘ net worth.

In 1970, he settled in Los Angeles, California, and began working on Hollywood movies including “Waterloo” (1970). In the course of the following years, he produced several movies including his own “F for Fake’ (1973), and also narrated the 1986 animated movie “The Transformers: The Movie” as well as 1981 TV mini-series “Tales of the Klondike”. In 1979, Welles appeared in “The Muppet Movie” while between 1981 and 1981 he starred as Robin Masters in “Magnum, P.I.”. In his career, Welles added 123 acting credits to his professional portfolio, and over 60 directing and producing credits as well. In 1975 he was honored with an American Film Institute Award for Life Achievement, while in 2002, posthumously, the British Film Institute named him the greatest film director of all time. It is certain that all these ventures helped Orson Welles to earn a significant amount of wealth.

When it comes to his personal life, Welles was married three times – with Virginia Nicolson, between 1934 and 1940, with whom he had one child. In 1943, he married actress Rita Hayworth, and during their five-year long marriage, they had one child too. From 1955 ’til his death in 1985, he was married to Paola Mora, who is also the mother of one of Welles’ children. He passed away from a heart attack at the age of 70, on the 10th October 1985 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

IMDB Wikipedia $20 million 1.87 m 1915 1915-05-06 1985 1985-10-10 Actor Beatrice Ives Beatrice Ives Welles Beatrice Welles California Christopher Welles Feder Dickie Welles Hollywood Kenosha Los Angeles May 6 October 10 Orson Welles Orson Welles Net Worth Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show Paola Mori (m. 1955–1985) Rebecca Rebecca Welles Richard Head Welles Richard Hodgdon Head Welles Rita Hayworth Rita Hayworth (m. 1943–1947) Todd Seminary for Boys United States Virginia Nicholson m. 1934–1940 Virginia Nicolson Welles Manning Wisconsin

Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show Quick Info

Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show Trademarks

1. Known for his use of low camera angles, tracking shots, deep focus and elaborate crane shots in his films.
2. Frequently wrote, directed and starred in films that feature the rise and fall of main characters (Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941), Gregory Arkadin in _Confidential Report (1955)_, Detective Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958)) who, in classic Shakespearean style, are unmade by their own vices.
3. Frequently cast Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane and Oja Kodar
4. One of the most recognizable deep voices in all of film, radio or television.

Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show Quotes

• You know, I always loved Hollywood. It was just never reciprocated.
• [on Tim Holt, with whom he worked in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)] One of the most interesting actors that’s ever been in American movies, and he decided to be just a cowboy actor. Made two or three important pictures in his career, but was very careful not to follow them up–went straight back to bread-and-butter Westerns… he was the most marvelous fellow to work with you can imagine.
• [on why he hired Fortunio Bonanova for Citizen Kane (1941)] I saw him as the leading man with Katharine Cornell in “The Green Hat” when I was about eight years old. I never forgot him. He looked to me like a leading man in a dirty movie. Sent for him the minute I wrote that part. He was a great romantic leading man. When he was prompting her [Dorothy Comingore] in the opera, he was so marvelous. God, he was funny.
• [on director W.S. Van Dyke, aka “Woody”] Woody made some very good comedies. And what a system he had!… His retakes sometimes took longer than his original shooting schedule… He’d shoot a “Thin Man” or something like that in about 20 days. Then he’d preview it and come back to the studio for 30 days of retakes. For comedy, when you’re worried about the laughs, that makes a lot of sense.
• [on his famous “cuckoo clock” speech in The Third Man (1949) (“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love–they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.] When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks–they all come from the Schwarzwald [Black Forest] in Bavaria.
• [on finding work to Hollywood in the late 1950s after spending several years in Europe] I went a year without almost nothing, just sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. And then I got a couple of jobs. The Long, Hot Summer (1958), which I hated making–I’ve seldom been as unhappy in a picture.
• [on his friend William Faulkner] I never saw him anything but wildly drunk through the years. He must have been sober to produce that great body of work.
• [asked about the rumor that he directed part of Compulsion (1959), credited to Richard Fleischer] Dick Fleischer is a director who doesn’t need and wouldn’t welcome any help from me.
• [on working with Charlton Heston] All you have to do is point and Chuck can go in any direction. He’s spent a lot of years being a movie star.
• [on Luis Buñuel] He’s a deeply Christian man who hates God as only a Christian can and, of course, he’s very Spanish.
• [on the many documentary films he had narrated] I never saw the movies. That’s always been a condition of mine in narrating a film–that I don’t have to see any footage. Otherwise, I won’t accept the job.
• [on making I tartari (1961)] Victor Mature and I had an extended sword fight, on which I worked day after day. And in no shots–full, long, medium–at any moment is Victor Mature EVER involved! Not even to hold the sword and look menacing… He said, “Oh, I don’t want to do any of that stuff.”.
• [on shooting Macbeth (1948)] Our best crowd scene was a shot where all the massed forces of Macduff’s army are charging the castle. There was a very vivid sense of urgency to it, because what was happening, really, was that we’d just called noon break, and all those extras were rushing off to lunch.
• Hollywood died on me as soon as I got there. I wish to God I’d gone there sooner. It was the rise of the independents that was my ruin as a director.
• We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.
• [on Gary Cooper] You’d see him working on the set and you’d think, “My God, they’re going to have to retake that one!”. He almost didn’t seem to BE there. And then you’d see the rushes, and he’d fill the screen.
• I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness.
• [on television] We live in a world of happy endings with audiences who make every show, no matter how doomed it is and ready to be canceled, sound like a smash hit. And if not, they have a little black box full of laughter, and they add that to the jokes. And you know that most of the people laughing on that box died long ago.
• [on Anthony Asquith] One of the nicest, most intelligent people who was ever in films… and my God, he was polite. I saw him, all alone on the stage once, trip on an electric cable, turn around, and say, “I beg your pardon” to it.
• [on rumors that he, and not Robert Stevenson, directed Jane Eyre (1943)] I invented some of the shots–that’s part of being that kind of producer. And I collaborated on it, but I didn’t come around behind the camera and direct it. Certainly, I did a lot more than a producer ought to, but Stevenson didn’t mind that. And I don’t want to take credit away from him, all of which he deserves… In fact, we got along very well, and there was no trouble.
• [Irving Thalberg] was the biggest single villain in the history of Hollywood. Before him, a producer made the least contribution, by necessity. The producer didn’t direct, he didn’t act, he didn’t write–so, therefore, all he could do was either (a) mess it up, which he didn’t do very often, or (b) tenderly caress it. Support it. Producers would only go to the set to see that you were on budget, and that you didn’t burn down the scenery… Once you got the educated producer, he has a desk, he’s gotta have a function, he’s gotta do something. He’s not running the studio and counting the money–he’s gotta be creative. That was Thalberg. The director became the fellow whose only job was to say, “Action!” and “Cut!”. Suddenly you were “just a director” on a “Thalberg production”. A role had been created in the world. Just as there used to be no conductor of symphonies… He convinced [Louis B. Mayer] that without him, his movies wouldn’t have any class. Remember that quote Mayer gave? All the other moguls were “dirty kikes making nickelodeon movies”. He used to say that to me all the time.
• [on Meyer Lansky] He was probably the #1 gangster in America. I knew them all. You had to. If you lived, as I did, on Broadway during that period, if you lived in nightclubs, you could not not know them. I liked screwing the chorus girls, and I liked meeting all the different people who would come in, and I liked staying up until five in the morning, and they used to love to go to nightclubs. They would come and sit at your table… [asked how Lee Strasberg did with the Hyman Roth character, who was supposed to be Lansky, in The Godfather: Part II (1974)] Much better than the real thing. Meyer Lansky was a boring man. Hyman Roth is who he should have been! They all should have been like that, and none of them were. “The Godfather” was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed. The best of them were the kind of people you’d expect to drive a beer truck. They had no class. The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
• [Louis B. Mayer] offered me his studio! He was madly in love with me, because I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, you know? Twice he brought me over–spent all day wooing me. He called me “Orse”. Whenever he sent for me, he burst into tears, and once he fainted. To get his way. It was fake, ­absolutely fake. The deal was, I’d have the studio, but I’d have to stop acting, directing and writing–making pictures. But Mayer was self-righteous, smarmy, waving the American flag, doing deals with The Purple Gang [a violent gang of hijackers and killers] in Detroit… before the unions, it was all Mafia. But no one called it the Mafia. Just said “the mob”.
• In his time, Samuel Goldwyn was considered a classy producer because he never deliberately did anything that wasn’t his idea of the best-quality goods. I respected him for that. He was an honest merchant. He may have made a bad picture, but he didn’t know it was a bad picture. And he was funny. He actually once said to me, in that high voice of his, “Orson, for you I’d write a blanket check.” He said, “With Warner Brothers, a verbal commitment isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”.
• After [Irving Thalberg] died, Norma Shearer–one of the most minimally ­talented ladies ever to appear on the ­silver screen and who looked like ­nothing, with one eye crossed over the other–went right on being the queen of Hollywood. Everybody used to say, “Mrs. Thalberg is coming”, “Miss Shearer is arriving”, as though they were talking about Sarah Bernhardt.
• I never could stand looking at Bette Davis, so I don’t want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man. [Henry Jaglom], I’ve never understood why. Have you met him? Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the [Charles Chaplin] disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge… Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world-a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.
• [on a lunch encounter with Richard Burton] Richard Burton had great talent. He’s ruined his great gifts. He’s become a joke with a celebrity wife. Now he just works for money, does the worst shit. And I wasn’t rude. To quote Carl Laemmle, “I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, ‘Go fuck yourself’.”.
• I think it’s very harmful to see movies for movie makers because you either imitate them or worry about not imitating them and you should do movies innocently and i lost my innocence. Every time i see a picture i lose something i don’t gain. I never understand what directors mean when they compliment me and say they’ve learned from my pictures because i don’t believe in learning from other people’s pictures. You should learn from your own interior vision and discover innocently as though there had never been D.W. Griffith or [Sergei M. Eisenstein] or [John Ford] or [Jean Renoir] or anybody.
• I liked the cinema better before I began to do it. Now I can’t stop myself from hearing the clappers at the beginning of each shot. All the magic is destroyed.
• A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.
• I know that in theory the word is secondary in cinema, but the secret of my work is that everything is based on the word. I always begin with the dialogue. And I do not understand how one dares to write action before dialogue. I must begin with what the characters say. I must know what they say before seeing them do what they do.
• The only good artists are feminine. I don’t believe an artist exists whose dominant characteristic is not feminine. It’s nothing to do with homosexuality, but intellectually an artist must be a man with feminine aptitudes.
• [on Jean-Luc Godard] His gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker – and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.
• [on Nostradamus’ ability to predict the future] One might as well make predictions based on random passages from the phone book.
• I don’t think history can possibly be true. Possibly! I’ll tell you why. We all know people who get things written about, and we know that they’re lies written. I told a story to Buck Henry, last year in Weymouth, and he told the story that he thought I told him to a newspaper that I read the other day, and it bears not the *slightest* resemblance to what I said! Now, that’s an intelligent man, a year later, meaning me well, and that’s the gospel according to Buck Henry, and it’s totally apocryphal. Imagine what nonsense everything else is!
• [to Dick Cavett] I’m always sorry to hear that anybody I admire has been an actor… When did you go straight?
• [on Stanley Kubrick] Among the young generation, Kubrick strikes me as a giant.
• The optimists are incapable of understanding what it means to adore the impossible.
• [on Edward G. Robinson] An immensely effective actor.
• [on Federico Fellini] His films are a small-town boy’s dream of a big city. His sophistication works because it is the creation of someone who doesn’t have it. But he shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say.
• [on René Clair] A real master: he invented his own Paris, which is better than recording it.
• [on James Cagney] No one was more unreal and stylized, yet there is no moment when he was not true.
• [on his favorite directors] I prefer the old masters; by which I mean: John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.
• If spiritually you’re part of the cat family, you can’t bear to be laughed at. You have to pretend when you fall down that you really wanted to be down there to see what’s under the sofa. The rest of us don’t at all mind being laughed at.
• I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
• Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad, except you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
• Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
• I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.
• Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
• A good artist should be isolated. If he isn’t isolated, something is wrong.
• Everybody denies that I am genius – but nobody ever called me one.
• I’m not rich. Never have been. When you see me in a bad movie as an actor (I hope not as a director), it is because a good movie has not been offered to me. I often make bad films in order to live.
• I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
• The word “genius” was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn’t until middle age.
• I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theater, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.
• A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
• I don’t pray because I don’t want to bore God.
• I think it is always a tremendously good formula in any art form to admit the limitations of the form.
• I think I’m… I made essentially a mistake staying in movies, because I… but it… it’s the mistake I can’t regret because it’s like saying, “I shouldn’t have stayed married to that woman, but I did because I love her.” I would have been more successful if I’d left movies immediately. Stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written–anything. I’ve wasted the greater part of my life looking for money, and trying to get along… trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box which is an… a movie. And I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It’s about 2% movie making and 98% hustling. It’s no way to spend a life.
• My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
• For thirty years, people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don’t. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.
• [At RKO Radio Pictures working on “Heart of Darkness”, a film he later abandoned] This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!
• [on Citizen Kane (1941) being colorized] Keep Ted Turner and his goddamned Crayolas away from my movie.
• I hate it when people pray on the screen. It’s not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I’m lost. There’s only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that’s sex. You just can’t get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.
• If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.
• I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.
• [on Hollywood in the 1980s] We live in a snake pit here… I hate it but I just don’t allow myself to face the fact that I hold it in contempt because it keeps on turning out to be the only place to go.
• Movie directing is the perfect refuge for the mediocre.
• I’m not bitter about Hollywood’s treatment of me, but over its treatment of D.W. Griffith, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton and a hundred others.
• I started at the top and worked down.
• I’m not very fond of movies. I don’t go to them much.
• [on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
• Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit.

Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show Important Facts

• $50,000
• $100,000
• settlement of debts worth $15,000
• $150,000
• $60,000
• $5,000
• £6,000
• £75 per episode
• £10,000
• $15,000
• $100,000
• $100,000
• $100,000 (for acting, adapting and directing)
• $50,000
• $20,000
• $50,000
• $100,000
• Spoke French fluently.
• Along with Laurence Olivier, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Kenneth Branagh, Clint Eastwood and Roberto Benigni, he is one of only seven men to receive Academy Award nominations for both Best Actor and Best Director for the same film: Welles for Citizen Kane (1941), Olivier for Hamlet (1948), Allen for Annie Hall (1977), Beatty for both Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Reds (1981), Branagh for Henry V (1989), Eastwood for Unforgiven (1992) and Benigni for Life Is Beautiful (1997).
• Was the voice of Unicron in the theatrical release of The Transformers: The Movie (1986), but was replaced by Roger C. Carmel (after he died) for the third season of the animated series The Transformers (1984).
• Has been played by Steven Lamprinos in Hollywood Mouth 2 (2014). The director of that film, Jordan Mohr, wanted an Orson Welles character in the movie because she is from Venice, California, where Touch of Evil (1958) was filmed.
• Laurence Olivier strongly considered casting Welles as the Duke of Buckingham in Richard III (1955) but felt obligated to cast his close friend Ralph Richardson in the role. Olivier came to regret this decision as he believed that Welles would have added an element of conspiracy to the film.
• He had three Shakespearean roles in common with Laurence Olivier: (1) Welles played Othello in Othello (1951) while Olivier played him in Othello (1965), (2) Welles played King Lear in Omnibus: King Lear (1953) while Olivier played him in King Lear (1983) and (3) Welles played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1969) while Olivier played him in The Merchant of Venice (1973).
• His full name is George Orson Welles. He was named “George” in honor of writer George Ade, who was a friend of the family. His middle name was in honor of another family friend, a man named Orson Wells (without the “e”).
• The Last Picture Show (1971) was filmed in black and white because of Welles’ famous remark to Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt, when director and crew were uncertain on how to film the locations without using too many colors. Welles, who was on the set, replied: “Of course you’ll film it in black and white!” The advice proved to be helpful because the film was praised for (among other qualities) its cinematography, which earned Robert Surtees an Oscar nomination.
• Became a father for the fourth time at age 40 when his third wife Paola Mori gave birth to their daughter Beatrice Welles on November 13, 1955.
• Became a father for the third time at age 29 when his second wife Rita Hayworth gave birth to their daughter Rebecca Welles on December 17, 1944.
• Became a father for the second time at age 25 when his married lover Geraldine Fitzgerald gave birth to their son Michael Lindsay-Hogg on June 5, 1940.
• Became a father for the first time at age 22 when his first wife Virginia Nicolson gave birth to their daughter Christopher Welles on March 27, 1938.
• Once referred to the audience as “the big, many-headed beast crouching out there in the darkness”.
• Welles was so impressed with Dorothea Durham that he walked on stage where she was performing at the Club Rhumboogie and put $500 in her hand. Durham, who went by the stage name La Garbo, was a popular dancer in the 1930s and 1940s on the West Coast. She also danced at the Cotton Club in Harlem and in Duke Ellington’s “Jump for Joy”, and appeared as a dancer in movies such as Cabin in the Sky (1943).
• Film critics lobbied for him to record an audio commentary for Citizen Kane (1941), but he refused, stating that he was tired of talking about it.
• George, his given name, was in honor of his father’s friend, humorist George Ade.
• He remained good friends with Joseph Cotten until the end of his life, despite a working relationship that was often considered demanding of the older Cotten.
• He and John Huston were good friends from the 1940s to Welles’ death in 1985. Both men coincidentally made their spectacular debut as directors in 1941 (Welles with Citizen Kane (1941) and Huston with The Maltese Falcon (1941)). Both would eventually be directed by the other: Welles’ had a cameo in Huston’s adaptation of Moby Dick (1956) and Huston played the lead in Welles’ unfinished The Other Side of the Wind (2017).
• He directed two actors to Oscar nominations: Himself (Best Actor, Citizen Kane (1941)), and Agnes Moorehead (Best Supporting Actress, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)).
• His last completed work as director was “The Orson Welles Show”, a never broadcast television show.
• Was friends with Josip Broz Tito, a partisan guerrilla leader who fought the Nazis in World War II Yugoslavia, and who later became president of the country.
• When execs at RKO could not decide to greenlight Citizen Kane (1941), Welles asked the studio for film equipment and a small crew so he could spend the midway time doing test shots. Not wanting its new import from New York to sour on his deal with RKO, the studio granted the request. Welles proceeded to shoot actual scenes of the movie. By the time execs realized what he had done, Welles had many key scenes completed. RKO greenlit the film, having already–albeit unknowingly–financed the picture.
• He died only two hours after being interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show (1962) on October 10, 1985. Reportedly, Welles died working with a typewriter in his lap.
• He was awarded 2 Stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Motion Pictures at 1600 Vine Street; and for Radio at 6652 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.
• Was close friends with Bud Cort.
• He was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute in recognition of his outstanding contribution to film culture.
• He was of German, Irish and Scottish heritage.
• Was George Lucas’ first choice as the voice for Darth Vader, but he thought the voice would be too recognizable.
• CBS wanted him to host The Twilight Zone (1959) but the producers felt that he requested too much money. He was ultimately ruled out in favor of the show’s creator, Rod Serling.
• Biography in: “The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives”. Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 861-864. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998.
• John Ford, whom Welles admired as the greatest American director and who, in turn, admired Welles as a director and actor, wanted to cast him as Mayor Frank Skeffington in his movie adaption of Edwin O’Connor’s novel The Last Hurrah (1958). Welles was unable to accept the role due to scheduling conflicts, and Spencer Tracy was cast instead.
• Hated working on The Transformers: The Movie (1986), where he voiced Unicron. When asked about the film, he not only could not remember the name of his character, but he described the film as being “I play a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys.”.
• His performance as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941) is ranked #12 on Premiere magazine’s 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.
• His performance as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) is ranked #93 on Premiere magazine’s 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.
• Merv Griffin claimed in his DVD collection “Merv Griffin: Interesting People” that Welles died two hours after giving Merv an interview in which he had said to ask him anything, “for this interview, there are no subjects about which I won’t speak”. In the past, Welles refused to speak about the past.
• Profiled in in J.A. Aberdeen’s “Hollywood Renegades: The Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers” (Palos Verdes Estates, CA: Cobblestone Entertainment).
• In the 1930s, he worked at various radio stations in New York City, at different times of the day. He found it difficult to be on time for his live shows because he had to use taxicabs and the heavy New York City traffic meant that he was often late. He soon found a loophole in the law that said you didn’t have to be sick to hire an ambulance, so he did just that and had the drivers blast their sirens as he traveled from one station to the next, and that way he was on time.
• Has been played by Vincent D’Onofrio twice: Ed Wood (1994) and Five Minutes, Mr. Welles (2005).
• Longtime companions with Oja Kodar. They lived together until his death.
• Most of his movie projects never got finished or released due to financial problems and disputes with studio executives. Some of his unfinished productions are: The Deep (1970) (Laurence Harvey’s death made a finished movie impossible), The Merchant of Venice (1969) and Don Quixote (1992).
• Was a passionate painter
• Was very good friends with Peter Bogdanovich, in whose house he lived for several years during Bogdanovich’s affair with Cybill Shepherd. Welles even gave Bogdanovich written instructions to finish his last film, The Other Side of the Wind (2017), before his death.
• Considered black and white to be “the actor’s best friend”, feeling that it focused more on the actor’s expressions and feelings than on hair, eye or wardrobe color.
• His father was an alcoholic.
• Ranked #9 in Empire (UK) magazine’s “The Greatest directors ever!” [2005].
• His average dinner famously consisted of two steaks cooked rare and a pint of scotch whiskey. This contributed to his obesity in his later life and his eventual death.
• Before deciding on adapting the life of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane (1941), Welles intended his first film to be an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. Coincidentally, he was Francis Ford Coppola’s first choice for the role of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979), itself an adaptation of “Heart of Darkness”.
• Was the narrator for many of the trailers for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).
• Was named #16 on the 50 Greatest Screen Legends list of the American Film Institute.
• He made The Lady from Shanghai (1947) towards the end of his marriage to Rita Hayworth. They were constantly fighting at the time and (some say as a comeuppance to Hayworth) he made her cut off most of her long, luxurious red hair and dye it bright platinum blonde.
• Lobbied to get the role of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972), even offered to lose a good deal of weight in order to get the role. Francis Ford Coppola, a huge fan of his, had to turn him down because he already had Marlon Brando in mind for the role and felt Welles would not be right for the role.
• Laurence Olivier had wanted to cast him as Buckingham in Richard III (1955), his film of William Shakespeare’s play “Richard III”, but gave the role to Ralph Richardson, his oldest friend, because Richardson wanted it. In his autobiography, Olivier says he wishes he had disappointed Richardson and cast Welles instead, as he would have brought an extra element to the screen, an intelligence that would have gone well with the plot element of conspiracy.
• Wrote his novel “Mr. Arkadian” during an extended stay with Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh. Welles was appearing at Olivier’s St. James Theater in London at the time.
• He had wanted to make films of two literary masterpieces, Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”, but had to be satisfied in having supporting roles in the films made of the two books by John Huston (Moby Dick (1956)) and Mike Nichols (Catch-22 (1970)).
• Told Peter Bogdanovich that, as a practicing magician, he became adept at the old carny trick of fortune-telling, but he became so good at it that it scared him. He was worried that he would come to believe he actually did have the power to tell the future, like the self-deluded fortune tellers known as a “shut eye”.
• When he signed on to direct Touch of Evil (1958), instead of reading the book on which it was based–a pulp novel named “Badge of Evil”–Welles completely changed an early draft of the script.
• Was suggested as a possible suspect by author Mary Pacios, in the mutilation murder of actress Elizabeth Short, known as “The Black Dahlia” case, in Los Angeles in 1947. Among other reasons, Pacios suggested Welles as a suspect because Welles’ artwork for the surreal bizarre funhouse set in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) was similar in many ways to the mutilation and bisection of Elizabeth Short. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures–the studio that produced The Lady from Shanghai–ordered the footage cut before release because of its disturbing resemblance to the murder.
• His 1937 Broadway stage production of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”–in which the setting was changed to a modern Fascist Rome to reflect the Benito Mussolini era, but in which Shakespeare’s language was completely retained–became, and still remains, the longest-running Broadway production of the play. Welles played Brutus. This production was never filmed, but years later Welles’ former working partner John Houseman produced a traditional film version of the play for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring James Mason as Brutus, Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, and John Gielgud as Cassius.
• Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. “World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890- 1945”. Pages 1168-1185. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
• Was voted the Second Greatest Film Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
• Was possibly not as tall as is often reported. According to Simon Callow’s “Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu”, medical records exist from a Welles physical in 1941. His weight is listed as 218, and his height at 72″ – 6 feet even. Biographers Charles Higham and Frank Brady describe Welles as being 6’2″, though they never provide a source. Biographer Barbara Leaming often comments on his height, but never gives an exact measurement. An early Current Biography article on Welles describes him as being “tall and chubby”, while a later one gives the obviously incorrect 6’3-1/2″ height. If you average all the figures and based on his size compared to other actors, he probably in fact stood a little over 6 feet tall (6’1″ to 6’2″).
• He became obese in his 40s, weighing over 350 pounds towards the end of his life.
• Has provided voice for some songs by the heavy metal band Manowar: “Dark Avenger” and “Defender”.
• He was the studio’s first choice to play the voice-over role of OMM in THX 1138 (1971). However, director George Lucas insisted on casting the relatively unknown stage actor James Wheaton instead.
• Has the distinction of appearing in both the American Film Institute and British Film Institute’s #1 movie. For AFI, it was Citizen Kane (1941). For BFI, it was The Third Man (1949). Welles shares this distinction with Joseph Cotten, who also starred in both movies.
• He portrayed the title character on the syndicated radio show “The Lives of Harry Lime” (also known as “The Third Man”) (1951-52). This was based on his character from the film The Third Man (1949).
• Host/narrator of the BBC/Mutual Radio’s “The Black Museum” (1952).
• Frank Sinatra was the godfather of his and Rita Hayworth’s daughter, Rebecca Welles.
• Posthumously inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1988.
• Made a Hollywood satire, The Other Side of the Wind (2017), starring John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. Though it was completed, the post-production process was not and the film also ran into legal problems.
• He tried to make a film version of Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra’ book “Don Quixote”. He started working on it in 1955 and continued to film through the 1970s with Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff starring. An incomplete version was released in Spain in 1992.
• He was born on the same day that Babe Ruth hit his very first home run.
• A bootleg tape of a short-tempered (and foul-mouthed) Welles arguing with a recording engineer during a voice-over session has been widely distributed. It was used as the basis for an episode of the animated series Pinky and the Brain (1995), with The Brain reading cleaned-up versions of Orson’s rantings (the episode’s title, “Yes, Always”, is taken from one of Welles’ complaints). Ironically, the actor who plays The Brain, Maurice LaMarche, dubbed the voice of the actor who portrays Welles in Ed Wood (1994).
• Despite his reputation as an actor and master filmmaker, he maintained his memberships in the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society of American Magicians (neither of which are unions, but fraternal organizations), and regularly practiced sleight-of-hand magic in case his career came to an abrupt end. Welles occasionally performed at the annual conventions of each organization, and was considered by fellow magicians to be extremely accomplished.
• On October 30, 1938, he directed “The Mercury Theatre On the Air” in a dramatization of “The War of the Worlds”, based on H.G. Wells’ novel. Setting the events in then-contemporary locations (The “landing spot” for the Martian invasion, Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, was chosen at random with a New Jersey road map) and dramatizing it in the style of a musical program interrupted by news bulletins, complete with eyewitness accounts, it caused a nationwide panic, with many listeners fully convinced that the Earth was being invaded by Mars. The next day, Welles publicly apologized. While many lawsuits were filed against both Welles and the CBS radio network, all were dismissed. The incident is mentioned in textbook accounts of mass hysteria and the delusions of crowds.
• One of only six actors to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his first screen appearance. The other five actors are: Paul Muni, Lawrence Tibbett, Alan Arkin, James Dean and Montgomery Clift.
• Ashes are buried inside an old well covered by flowers, within the rural property of the now-deceased, then-retired bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez, Ronda, Malaga, Spain.
• He died on the same day as his Bitka na Neretvi (1969) co-star Yul Brynner: October 10, 1985.
• ABC-TV wanted him to play Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island (1977), but the series’ producer, Aaron Spelling, insisted on Ricardo Montalban.
• H.G. Wells was driving through San Antonio, Texas, and stopped to ask the way. The person he happened to ask was none other than Welles’, who had recently broadcast “The War of the Worlds” on the radio. They got on well and spent the day together.
• Welles’ Oscar statuette sold for $861,542, when it was auctioned by Nate D. Sanders Memorabilia on December 20, 2011.
• Once ate 18 hot dogs in one sitting at Pink’s, a Los Angeles hot dog stand.

Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show Filmography

Orson Welles’ Mercury Wonder Show Awards