Simon Callow
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Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
Simon Callow
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…
