Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welleswas an American actor, director, writer, and producer who worked in theatre, radio, and film. He is remembered for his innovative work in all three: in theatre, most notably Caesar, a Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; in radio, the 1938 broadcast "The War of the Worlds", one of the most famous in the history of radio; and in film, Citizen Kane, consistently ranked as one of the all-time greatest films...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 May 1915
CityKenosha, WI
CountryUnited States of America
Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.
The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer.
The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.
I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.
The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.
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.
I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.
Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.
I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.
Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.
I think I made essential a mistake in staying in movies, because I - but it's a mistake I can't regret, because it's like saying, 'I shouldn't have stayed married to that woman, but I did because I love her.'
In attempting to explain F For Fake's state-side failure, it has occurred to me that perhaps the subject matter was at least partially to blame, and that this country is so blissfully enslaved by the notion of the special sanctity of the expert that an overtly anti-expert film was bound to go too much against the national grain.