George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
At age 21, Welles was directing high-profile stage productions for the Federal Theatre Project in New York City—starting with a celebrated 1936 adaptation of Macbeth with an African-American cast, and ending with the controversial labor opera The Cradle Will Rock in 1937. He and John Houseman then founded the Mercury Theatre, an independent repertory theatre company that presented a series of productions on Broadway through 1941, including a modern, politically charged Caesar (1937). In 1938, his radio anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air gave Welles the platform to find international fame as the director and narrator of a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, which caused some listeners to believe that a Martian invasion was in fact occurring. Although reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed 23-year-old Welles to notoriety.
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o I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.
o Only very intelligent people don’t wish they were in politics, and I’m dumb enough to want to be in there.
o I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I’m pretty careful to lose most of them.
o My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
o The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
o The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics – the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
o A good artist should be isolated. If he isn’t isolated, something is wrong.
o 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.
o Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
o I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
o 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.
o I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.