Orson Welles was a child prodigy, born to a wealthy inventor father and a beautiful concert pianist mother. He was talented in many areas, including magic, piano, and painting. After his mother's death when he was nine, he traveled the world with his father, furthering his education and honing his skills.
Orson Welles is a member of Actor
Age, Biography and Wiki
💰 Net worth
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Jane Eyre (1943)
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$100,000 |
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Follow the Boys (1944)
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$50,000 |
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Tomorrow Is Forever (1946)
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$20,000 |
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The Stranger (1946)
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$50,000 |
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Macbeth (1948)
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$100,000 (for acting, adapting and directing) |
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Black Magic (1949)
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$100,000 |
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The Third Man (1949)
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$100,000 |
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I Love Lucy (1951)
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$15,000 |
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Trouble in the Glen (1954)
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£10,000 |
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Around the World with Orson Welles (1955)
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£75 per episode |
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Moby Dick (1956)
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£6,000 |
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Lucy Meets Orson Welles (1956)
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$5,000 |
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Man in the Shadow (1957)
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$60,000 |
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The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
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$150,000 |
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The Roots of Heaven (1958)
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settlement of debts worth $15,000 |
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Compulsion (1959)
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$100,000 |
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The Kremlin Letter (1970)
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$50,000 |
His father was a well-to-do inventor, his mother a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died (he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. When his father died (he was fifteen) he became the ward of Chicago's Dr. Maurice Bernstein. In 1931, he graduated from the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois; he turned down college offers for a sketching tour of Ireland. He tried unsuccessfully to enter the London and Broadway stages, traveling some more in Morocco and Spain (where he fought in the bullring). Recommendations by Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott got him into Katherine Cornell's road company, with which he made his New York debut as Tybalt in 1934. The same year, he married, directed his first short, and appeared on radio for the first time. He began working with John Houseman and formed the Mercury Theatre with him in 1937. In 1938, they produced "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", famous for its broadcast version of "The War of the Worlds" (intended as a Halloween prank). His first film to be seen by the public was Citizen Kane (1941), a commercial failure losing RKO $150,000, but regarded by many as the best film ever made. Many of his next films were commercial failures and he exiled himself to Europe in 1948. In 1956, he directed Touch of Evil (1958); it failed in the United States but won a prize at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. In 1975, in spite of all his box-office failures, he received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1984, the Directors Guild of America awarded him its highest honor, the D.W. Griffith Award. His reputation as a filmmaker has climbed steadily ever since.
