Orson Welles

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Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

Author: Simon Callow
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Publisher: Viking Adult
Possibly only an actor and director as deeply familiar with the theater as Simon Callow, and as determined as he to capture the protean Welles whole, could have written this biography, of which The Road to Xanadu is the first volume. For here, brilliantly located in its historical and social setting, is the entire, magnificent, unbelievable story—the prodigious childhood; the dynamic young man in New York, in some ways still a boy, in others a profound theatrical innovator; the fraught partnership with John Houseman; the groundbreaking triumphs of the Mercury Theatre (such as the all-black Macbeth and Welles’s modern-dress Julius Caesar) and its disasters (equally fascinating); and finally Hollywood and Citizen Kane, even today regarded by many as the finest film ever made, the work of a twenty-three-year-old with no previous experience in the medium.

Callow’s lively account of the making of Kane is surely the best we are likely to have, as authoritative about the practical details of filmmaking and directing as about the odd creative relationship between Welles and writer Herman Mankiewicz. Written with verve and balanced affection, drawing upon an abundance of fresh research and hitherto unpublished material, The Road to Xanadu succeeds wonderfully in penetrating the smoke screen of legend Welles threw up around himself, to reveal a life that is even more extra-ordinary in fact. As a man and an artist, Orson Welles was outsize—vivid, energetic, unpredictable, and never less than entertaining. It is Simon Callow’s achievement to have produced a book about him that is just the same.

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Reviews

Amazon.com

Now in paperback, Callow’s vastly entertaining chronicle of Welles’s first 26 years seems even finer than it did in 1995. The author’s ability to skewer his subject’s evasions and lies while retaining critical affection for him is perhaps explained by the fact that Callow, an actor himself, understands the need to mythologize. Welles’s innovative theatrical work in the 1930s has never been better described or analyzed. Even such oft-told sagas as the War of the Worlds broadcast and the filming of Citizen Kane gain new dimension from Callow’s intelligent treatment.

Barnes and Noble

Never one to shy away from publicity, Orson Welles was nearly always delighted to accommodate the legions of interviewers, profilers, and biographers clamoring after his “story.” Early in his career he courted and wooed the press shamelessly, happily doling out tidbits to reporters, who were just as happy to gobble them up. Yet when he died, he left behind more questions than answers. So thoroughly had he embroidered, exaggerated, and invented the details of his life that no one knew where the truth ended and the myth began. This first in a proposed two-volume biography examines Orson Welles through the people and events he tried so hard to remove from his own self-invented history. Penetrating the smoke screen of legend, the author reconstructs Welles’s youth in New York, his troubled partnership with John Houseman, the triumphs and disasters of the fledgling Mercury Theater of the Air, and the crowning success of his life: the one and only Citizen Kane. Black-and-white photos.

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