Orson Welles, the director who made the greatest film and spent forty years being punished for it

Orson Welles

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 6, 1915 Kenosha, Wisconsin, USA
Died	October 10, 1985 (70)
Occupation	Director, Actor, Writer, Producer
Known for	Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, The Lady from Shanghai
Awards	Academy Award · Palme d'Or · Academy Honorary Award (1970) · AFI Life Achievement · BFI Fellowship (1983)

The most famous contract in Hollywood history arrived on Orson Welles’s desk when he was twenty-four years old. RKO Pictures gave him something the studio system almost never offers: complete creative control, final cut, and the freedom to make any film he chose. The studio believed they were acquiring a prodigy whose ambitions would translate well into entertainment. What Welles brought them was a film so formally radical in its construction that it effectively divided American cinema into before and after. RKO’s eventual response was to change their internal motto to ‘Showmanship In Place of Genius.’ The motto was widely understood as directed at one person.

Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1915, the second son of an inventor and a concert pianist. His mother died when he was nine; his father, struggling with alcoholism, died when he was fifteen. Raised partly by a family friend who recognized his abilities early, he was performing magic at twelve, painting seriously at thirteen, reciting Shakespeare from memory at fourteen. At sixteen, he walked into Dublin’s Gate Theatre and told the management he was an established Broadway actor. He was not an established Broadway actor. He got the part.

In New York, he staged Macbeth for the Federal Theatre Project with an entirely Black cast, setting the play in Haiti and transforming the witches into voodoo priests. He was twenty. The Mercury Theatre, which he co-founded with John Houseman in 1937, staged literature — Buchner, Dekker, Shakespeare, Shaw — with the formal intelligence of a company that treated the classics as live arguments. On October 30, 1938, the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds using a news bulletin format so convincingly executed that it generated alarm across the northeastern United States, put Welles on the front pages of every national newspaper, and got him a Hollywood contract.

Citizen Kane, which he co-wrote with Herman J. Mankiewicz and directed in 1941, received nine Academy Award nominations and won one — for the screenplay. The Best Director Oscar went to John Ford for How Green Was My Valley. Hearst’s newspaper chain refused to review the film or carry advertising for it. MGM executives reportedly offered RKO cash to destroy the negative. The Hearst-Kane parallels were exact enough to qualify as defamatory, and the film’s formal innovations — deep focus photography, overlapping dialogue, non-linear narrative structure — were sufficiently alien to the grammar of 1941 Hollywood that reviewers struggled to describe what they were looking at.

What the film’s reputation tends to obscure is what happened immediately after. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles’s second film, was an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an American dynasty’s decline as industrialism arrives. By the account of people who saw the original cut, it was more emotionally complex and structurally mature than Kane. RKO removed nearly fifty minutes from the film while Welles was in Brazil directing documentary footage about the war effort, replaced his ending with something consolatory, and burned the excised material rather than preserve it. The studio terminated Mercury Productions’ contract and effectively expelled Welles from Hollywood. He was twenty-seven. In 2025, an Amazon-backed artificial intelligence company announced plans to reconstruct those missing minutes using machine learning. The Welles estate called the initiative ‘disappointing’ and ‘a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking of a creative force like Welles.’ The mechanical reconstruction of something destroyed by institutional violence does not undo the institutional violence. It dramatizes it.

The next three decades Welles spent mostly in Europe, often self-financing his work by acting in other directors’ films. Othello — shot over four years, whenever Welles could accumulate enough money for a few days of filming — won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1952. Touch of Evil, which he was hired to direct by Universal Pictures in 1957, followed the same pattern: he completed a film that critics would eventually identify as one of the major American noirs of the decade, and Universal reedited it in his absence. He wrote a fifty-eight-page memo protesting the changes. In 1998, thirteen years after his death, a studio restoration used that memo to reconstruct something close to his original cut.

Orson Welles during the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast — Orson Welles, October 1938. Photo: Acme News Photos / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Chimes at Midnight, made in Spain in 1965, distilled five of Shakespeare’s history plays into a meditation on friendship, betrayal, and the use powerful men make of loyal ones. Many critics consider it his finest work. F for Fake, made in 1973, was an essay film about forgery, identity, and the mechanics of deception that anticipated documentary mode by two decades. The Other Side of the Wind, which he filmed intermittently beginning in 1970, was still unedited at his death. Netflix financed its completion in 2018, under the supervision of Peter Bogdanovich; the film, a mordant satire of Hollywood’s treatment of its own exiles, was received as confirmation of what Welles had argued for decades — that the work Hollywood could not accommodate was not inferior. It was simply incompatible with what studios were for.

On October 10, 1985, Welles taped an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show and returned home to Los Angeles, where he died of a heart attack that evening. He had been editing The Other Side of the Wind that morning. He was seventy years old. In 2002, both critics and directors polled by the British Film Institute named him the greatest film director who had ever lived. The Magnificent Ambersons still does not exist in its original form.