McGilligan has a tall order to fill, keeping nearly 800-pages compelling, and his writing flows with such force and emotion that it propels the already interesting characters forward at a breakneck pace. In fact, Welles might have been a genius raised by geniuses, with nearly everyone in his life bursting with accomplishments as he is. (I go with the latter interpretation.) Citizen Kane is always on the periphery, Welles’ “Big Idea.” Rumored to have an IQ of 185, Welles never considered himself a genius. In fact, so much of the actor/director life’s plays out so perfectly as to be either purely coincidental, authorial license, or fate. The layers of Welles’ life and myriad accomplishments unfurl like Russian nesting dolls with McGilligan charting the various events and people that Welles would be inspired by and utilize for Kane. If he achieved all this by the age of 25, I can only fathom how the remaining years of his life played out. Focused purely on Welles’ life from birth to 1940 – up to the making of Welles’ definitive work, Citizen Kane (1941) – it’s confounding how the man had the time to do everything that’s achieved throughout the tome’s 740-odd pages, let alone read about it. (Nov.Orson Welles was a mammoth personality whose life and times have been the subject of countless books, none more comprehensive than Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson. Exhaustively researched but well-paced and stuffed with beguiling detail, this is a vivid, sympathetic portrait of Welles’s youthful promise and achievement, before the misfires and compromises of his later years. It’s also a fine evocation of Welles’s innate charisma, concocted from a grand physical presence, godlike voice, Falstaffian magnetism, and uncanny precocious insight into character and dramatic effect. This is a book about families, with rich profiles of Welles’s affluent, indulgent parents a series of father figures who mentored him, promoted him, and lent him money and his close-knit acting ensemble at the Mercury Theater, where he played the paternal, tyrannical head of the household. His movie Citizen Kane, hailed by many critics as the greatest film ever, was made when he was just 25. Wells’s The War of the Worlds induced panic.
New York directing coups followed, including his all-black Macbeth and Fascist-themed Julius Caesar. Film historian McGilligan ( Nicholas Ray) follows Welles from his Illinois boarding-school productions (which even then drew press interest) to his professional debut at age 16 in Dublin, playing roles twice his age. Orson Welles, America’s storied show-biz boy wonder, appears to the manor born in this engrossing biography.
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