A superbly wrought, aesthetically and psychologically acute
portrait of Welles's sheer, undisciplined genius. The first of a
projected two volumes, this biography takes Welles to the grand old
age of 26 (where other talents usually begin their ascent to fame
and fortune) and the release of his masterpiece, Citizen Kane. But
what seemed like one more triumph in an ever more brilliant and
audacious career was really a cresting of the flood, and the years
to come, despite occasional squalls of genius, would be a sad, slow
ebbing away. As Callow (Charles Laughton, 1988, etc.) notes, Welles
had "created a body of work in several media that he would never
surpass: in the theater, in radio, in book illustration, in film."
Welles was an awesomely precocious child. Even when he was a
preschooler, most adults who encountered him, from preachers to
postmen, felt certain he was destined for greatness. Some of this
precocity was certainly due to Welles's ambitious, demanding
mother. Her death when he was nine left him with a driving and
lifelong sense of guilt and constant need to prove himself. Like
its subject, this biography occasionally tends to flabbiness.
Callow particularly overdetails Welles's substantial juvenilia
(i.e., his accomplishments before he was 17). But rarely, perhaps
not since Francois Truffaut's book on Hitchcock, has an arts
biographer possessed such a professional and intuitive
understanding of his subject. Callow, a British actor (most
recently in Four Weddings and a Funeral) and sometime director,
offers innumerable hard-won insights into Welles's artistic
processes, dissecting them with a careful, revealing hand, guided
by his actor's eye for psychological underpinnings. His research is
effortlessly vast, and Callow corrects many of the myths and
dissemblings surrounding Welles, some of them put out by Welles
himself. And this is all accomplished in a highly literate,
epigrammatic style that makes this biography a sumptuous pleasure
to read. A masterful effort. It will be a hard, fidgety wait for
the second volume. (Kirkus Reviews)
A brilliant biography of the young Orson Welles, from his prodigious childhood and youth, his triumphs with the Mercury Theatre, to the making of CITIZEN KANE. Vivid, vastly entertaining, this is the definitive Wells biography.
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