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George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an Academy
Award-winning American screenwriter, a radio, film and theatre director, a radio
and film producer and an actor in film and theatre, as well as a Grammy
Award-winning radio personality.
Welles first gained wide notoriety for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H.
G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Adapted to sound like a contemporary news
broadcast, it caused a large number of listeners to panic. Welles and his
biographers subsequently claimed he was exposing the gullibility of American
audiences in the tense preamble to the Second World War.
In the mid-1930s, his New York theatre adaptations of a voodoo
Macbeth and a contemporary Julius Caesar became legendary. Welles was also an
accomplished magician, starring in troop variety spectacles in the war years.
During this period he became a serious political activist and commentator through
journalism, radio and public appearances closely associated with Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
In 1941, he co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in Citizen
Kane, most often chosen in polls of film critics as the greatest film ever
made.
Welles received a 1975 American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement award, the
third person to do so after John Ford and James Cagney.
Despite this accolade, Welles's artistic ambitions as a producer
and director were frustrated by Hollywood movie studios. His one Hollywood film
that remains as he conceived it is Citizen Kane, and only because its contract
guaranteed him final cut. Although Welles remained on the margins of the main
studios as a director/producer, his larger-than-life personality made him a
bankable actor.
In his latter years he struggled against a Hollywood system that
refused to finance his independent film projects, making a living largely through
acting, commercials, and voice-over work.
Critical appreciation for Welles has increased since his death. He is now widely
acknowledged as one of the most important dramatic artists of the 20th century. In
1999, the American Film Institute ranked Welles as the 16th greatest male star of
all time.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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