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Date of Birth
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06-May-1915
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Place of Birth
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Kenosha
(Wisconsin, Kenosha County, United States of America, Area code 262)
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Nationality
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United States of America
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Also know as
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George Orson Welles, O.W. Jeeves, G.O. Spelvin, Orson Wells, Welles, George Orson Welles, George Orson Welles, George Orson Welles, G.O. Spelvin, O.W. Jeeves, George Orson Welles, O.W. Jeeves, G.O. Spelvin, George Orson Welles, Welles, George Orson Welles, G.O. Spelvin, O.W. Jeeves, Orson Wells, Welles, Джордж ОÌÑ€Ñон УÑÌллÑ, Джордж ОрÑон УÑллÑ, George Orson Welles, O. W. Jeeves, G. O. Spelvin
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Profession
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Film Director, Film Producer, Screenwriter, Actor, Television Director, Playwright, Film Editor, Theatre Director, Voice Actor, Radio personality, Television Producer, Production Designer, Costume Designer
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Quotes
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- I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
- 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.
- Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
- Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
- My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.
- 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.
- I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
- The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.
- The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
- Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
- I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers -- because males have got to try and justify their existence.
- The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
- The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.
- 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.
- When you are down and out something always turns up -- and it is usually the noses of your friends.
- I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
- Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
- Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
- They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
- A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
- Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!
- 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 girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.
- In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
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George Orson Welles was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably Caesar, a groundbreaking Broadway adaptation of Julius Caesar and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; The War of the Worlds, one of the most famous broadcasts in the history of radio; and Citizen Kane, consistently ranked as one of the all-time greatest films.
After directing a number of high-profile productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to notoriety.
His first film was Citizen Kane, which he co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in as Charles Foster Kane. Welles was an outsider to the studio system and directed only 13 full-length films in his career. While he struggled for creative control from the major film studios, his films were heavily edited and others remained unreleased. His distinctive directorial style featured layered and nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. He has been praised as a major creative force and as "the ultimate auteur." Welles followed up Citizen Kane with critically acclaimed films, including The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, and Touch of Evil in 1958.
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