Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Frank Lloyd Wright said architecture was the cathedral of the arts. I think the cinema is.

--Nicholas Ray

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Richard Linklater's new movie Me and Orson Welles will open in 44 cities across America on December 11 and for anyone interested in the arts, it should be a sheer delight. As Nicholas Ray notes, the film combines poetry (John Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn), theatre (Julius Caesar), photography, music, literature, fine art, and of course the cinema.

Perhaps what is even more important is that it is easily the most important film to have been made about Orson Welles work as an artist since he died in 1985. As such, it can have an enormous effect on future Welles projects, such as finishing The Other Side of the Wind, if it should meet with even a modest commercial success.

Which is why I would urge anyone reading this to try and go and see the movie this weekend if you possibly can. If Me and Orson Welles becomes an art house hit, it can only help to open up the logjam of Welles projects and material that has yet to see the light of day!

A listing of the cities and theatres where Me and Orson Welles will be opening this weekend appears after part one of my interview with Christian McKay and Richard Linklater.

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LAWRENCE FRENCH: You first played Orson Welles in 1994 in your one-man play, Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, which I understand was written with you in mind.

CHRISTIAN McKAY: It was actually written with me! What happened was we were looking for a one-man show to do and (director) Josh Richards suggested Orson Welles, but I didn’t want to play Welles because I thought they were having a go at my weight. While I was at RADA somebody said I looked like Orson Welles in The Third Man, but I was ignorant of the earlier Orson Welles at the beginning, being someone from my generation who only knew him as this gargantuan 350 lb. man, “that ton of humus” as Falstaff says. I had only remembered him from his Sherry adverts and his appearances on Michael Parkinson. Then, because I thought they were having a go at my weight, I didn’t want to play him. So I was suggesting we do Peter Sellers or Winston Churchill, Churchill being my favorite, my great hero, but I had never played a real life person before, I had always played fiction, so I thought it was an intriguing idea to do a one-man show and felt it would be a good theatrical lesson to learn. But it kept coming back to Orson and so I started reading about him and then of course, you get obsessed, don’t you?

LAWRENCE FRENCH: Yes, that can happen quite easily.

CHRISTIAN McKAY: I needed to know everything about him and at some point I found Wellesnet which was a great aid to me in the research I was doing and that I continued to do while I was doing the play and of course, when I did the film. There is one thing I won’t read though. I notice on your discussion page there is something about Me and Orson Welles. That is the only thing I won’t look at, although I’m very tempted, but it’s the only thing I can’t read on Wellesnet.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: Of course there’s a real danger of becoming too identified with Orson Welles, although I think it would be wonderful if you could play Welles again one more time in the screenplay Welles wrote about all the incredible events surrounding the staging of The Cradle Will Rock.

CHRISTIAN McKAY: Yes, but I don’t want to play him again, although I do have a very lucrative offer to do Rosebud. Rick and I have dreamed about re-visiting Welles again in about 20 years, as a bookend. We’ve talked about that and I really owe Rick so much, because it would have been so much easier for him to have just found a famous Hollywood actor and he could have made the film in America. The producers kept saying to him “get rid of the unknown limey! Who the hell is this guy” Richard just kept saying, “no, this is my Orson Welles.” They were even talking about doing a comedy skit, for publicity purposes and I said, “No, I can’t play Orson, no way.” It’s all right for Orson to do Dean Martin, but I couldn’t play him on Dean Martin, no way. It’s extraordinary because somebody asked me how he thought I would have gotten on with Orson and I said, “We wouldn’t have gotten on.” I really assert that. We wouldn’t have got on. I loved playing him and I feel very close to him, and I feel very protective of him. I’m not an apologist for him, but I will stick up for him.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: Richard, you worked with Vincent D’Onofrio on The Newton Boys, and Christian says he suggested several Hollywood actors to play the part when you first met, although he wouldn’t say who they were. Did you ever consider Vincent D’Onofrio to play Orson Welles?

RICHARD LINKLATER: No, because although I know Vince, that scene he did in Ed Wood convinced me all the more to go with an unknown actor. Look at how you see the one scene Vince did in Ed Wood. You are saying, “Vince is looking kind of like Welles, but he’s not quite like him,” so your critical antennae is going up, because you are judging the performance and you are not really experiencing the performance. So I thought the magic of the cinema could only take place if we used an unknown actor to play Welles. I felt it would happen more naturally if we went with somebody who was unknown. I thought you might more readily think you were hanging out with Orson Welles in 1937.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: Had you seen Ed Wood when you cast Vincent D’Onofrio in The Newton Boys?

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Since Me and Orson Welles was written by Robert Kaplow, a New Jersey English teacher, and concerns a fictional student who discovers the world of the lively arts in 1937 New York, it's only fitting that the movie will become a subject in classroom discussions.

To this end, Film Education in the UK has put together a marvelous study guide for Me and Orson Welles that explores in great detail the historical background of the film and the myriad of different ideas it contains.

As their website explains:

It features study materials and film clips designed to stimulate debate, discussion and reflection on Orson Welles, Shakespeare, performance, theatrical production and filmmaking.

The study guide addresses core elements of learning in English, Media, Film and Theatre Studies. The materials are most suitable for students aged 14-18.

You can download the study guide HERE.

In America The Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) has also put out a statement for teachers about Me and Orson Welles:

As a film that tells the story of the process of opening a show, Me and Orson Welles will be of particular interest to English and theatre students as well as educators who are well-acquainted with this exhausting, but profoundly gratifying process. Because Mr. Linklater and the film's producers intend for this movie to be an exploration of theatre history, Shakespearean drama and the theatrical work of Orson Welles, as well as all that is learned in the process of producing a show, a study guide has been developed and will be made available to educators free of charge. The study guide will provide educators and their students with a way to use Me and Orson Welles as a tool to study these important aspects of the film, as well as a springboard to study the history and context in which the film's story is told.

The producers plan for the study guide to be available in time for the film's New York City and Los Angeles release on November 25.

(Unfortunately, I haven't found the link to their study guide yet, but will add it when I do.)

In the meantime, EdTA's online site has an article by Jeffrey Sweet which contains some great photos of Orson Welles. It is entitled: Orson Welles: Finding New Ways to tell the Story.

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As Me and Orson Welles expands this week to theatres across America, one of the primary audiences who may be especially interested in seeing the film and talking about it will be teachers and their students.

Therefore, here is a short excerpt from Orson Welles chapter taken from Everybody's Shakespeare, the book he wrote in 1934 with Roger Hill, which became a big success with teachers and students in schools across the country, especially after Harper & Brothers issued the books as companion volumes to the first full-length audio recordings of William Shakespeare’s plays, as performed by Welles and his Mercury Theatre actors. The three plays released were Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, followed a few years later by Macbeth, all of which were “edited for reading and arranged for staging” by Roger Hill and Orson Welles.

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ON STAGING SHAKESPEARE AND ON SHAKESPEARE'S STAGE

By Orson Welles - Director of the Mercury Theater
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Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man's season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it's wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn't properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer's ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elizabeth.

Shakespeare speaks everybody's language, but with an Elizabethan accent. When he came squawking and red faced into it, England could carry a tune and was learning to talk. It was a kid of a country, waking up noisily and too suddenly into adolescence and bounding blithely into the sunny, early morning of modern times.

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Christian McKay and Richard Linklater spent one-and-a-half days in San Francisco to talk about their new film Me and Orson Welles and dazzled the preview audience at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas.

Having arrived in SF from the Austin premiere the night before, the San Francisco event was a much more low-key affair, since teen heart-throb Zac Efron had dropped off the promo tour for their stop in San Francisco. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since it made for a much more casual and intimate screening, where people in the audience could actually talk with both Richard and Christian after their long Q & A session. In fact, many Wellesnet members who attended the screening where able to chat one on one with Richard Linklater and Christian McKay when they adjourned to The Holding Company, next to the theatre for drinks after the show. Just imagine if Zac Efron tried to do that!

Earlier in the day, Mr. Linklater and Mr. McKay had done a Q & A after a matinee screening of the movie at George Lucas's Premiere Theatre in the Presidio, before they faced the press for a long afternoon of interviews at the Prescott Hotel near Union Square. I spoke to them for my allotted 30 minutes, but to my delight, Christian McKay happily agreed to a much longer tête-à-tête during the showing of the movie. The resulting interview, which I will be posting shortly, should prove to be a real delight to Wellesnet readers across the globe, as Mr. McKay has throughly immersed himself in researching Orson Welles, to the point of watching many of the terrible movies Welles appeared in, such as The Witching, Butterfly and Ferry To Hong Kong.

I'd also like to give a special thanks to Karen Larsen and her associates, Leo Wong and Kelda McKinney for doing such a splendid job in handling the movie's publicity in San Francisco.

It was also nice that Christian McKay told me he had just received word that he had been nominated for "Best Supporting Actor" in the independent "Spirit Award" nominations. I told him I thought he would also probably garner an Oscar nomination, but noted he will be facing some stiff competition from actors like Christoph Waltz, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Plummer and Alfred Molina.

Here is a short preview of our talk, which centers on an idea which would make a great extra for the DVD that Warner Bros Home Video will eventually release next year.

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CHRISTIAN McKAY: When I had lunch with Norman Lloyd in Los Angeles just before I spoke with you, we had talked about maybe going on the stage together and doing a talk show about the Mercury Theatre, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin and all the other people Norman has worked with. You would get some of the greatest stories that you would ever hear! Norman said to me, “Well, I haven’t been on the stage in a while, it’s been at least four years,” and I thought, “that would have made him 91!”

RICHARD LINKLATER: An evening with Christian and Norman Lloyd on the stage in LA would be amazing!

CHRISTIAN McKAY: Yes, wouldn’t that be great -- and if we could get it recorded so people could watch it, that would be fabulous, because there is nobody left alive who has met all these personalities and worked with them.

RICHARD LINKLATER: And you guys are two of the few people who could ask him all of the right questions.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: Well, I’d love to go to Los Angeles to talk to Norman Lloyd. In fact, perhaps Warner Bros. might want to do something like that as a supplement for the DVD release of the film. I think it would be fabulous if you directed Christian and Norman Lloyd in an evening of movie and stage memories at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood! Tim Burton did something similar when he did a interview with Vincent Price on film, but it was never finished.

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Richard Linklater and Christian McKay talked about their new film Me and Orson Welles for nearly an hour after a preview screening in San Francisco on December 2.

In the excerpt below they recall some details of Welles's production of Julius Caesar, related to them by the only two cast members of the play who are still alive, Norman Lloyd and Arthur Anderson. Mr. Anderson was the inspiration for the character played by Zac Efron in the movie and his memories of working with Orson Welles, taken from his introduction to The Best of the Old Time Radio Starring Orson Welles, follows.

In addition, Matt Enlow has posted a recent interview with Arthur Anderson at his Atom Blog where Mr. Anderson praises Me and Orson Welles, noting it "portrays Orson very well. He was charming, he was a damn good actor, but he wanted things his own way. Usually he knew what was right… what was creative."

Mr. Anderson also reveals he has an autobiography coming out early in 2010 titled An Actor’s Odyssey: From Orson Welles to Lucky the Leprechaun.

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RICHARD LINKLATER: Zac Efron’s character, Richard Samuels is loosely based on Arthur Anderson. He’s about 86 now and still lives in New York City. He’s one of two people still alive who appeared in the original production. Norman Lloyd who played Cinna the poet is also still with us. Christian has talked with Norman and now they are best friends. I talked with Arthur a couple of times on the phone. We don’t know if they have seen the movie or not, but it must be bizarre for them. I think they may have a weird relationship to it, because just imagine somebody doing a movie about your life from 72 years before! I hope we have captured the spirit of the show. That’s all you can do, is try your best.

CHRISTIAN McKAY: Norman Lloyd said to me, “Did you have a red wall (for the back of the stage), and I said, “yes… did you remember the smell of the paint?” – and I could see Norman going back 72 years, remembering and he said, “The Smell? The theatre Stank!!”

RICHARD LINKLATER: We were trying to be faithful to people's memories, even though Norman remembered the Mercury theatre with a curtain, but it famously didn’t have a curtain. He remembers his scene (Cinna being killed) as the pivotal scene in the play, and Welles cut it out of the play and then he put it back in, so we honored his memory of the event and we tried to do that with everyone who wrote about it.

Arthur told me he really did set off the sprinklers in the theatre. That really did happen. He was like a little Gremlin kid, who was only 15 at the time. He was also the only one who had his name changed. In the novel Robert Kaplow changed Arthur's name to Richard and he fictionalized him, so he was loosely based on himself and his father. Arthur also didn’t get fired on opening night. That was part of the fiction. He actually finished the run of the play and was in a lot of additional Mercury Theatre radio shows. Whenever they needed a kid, they would call him up. He ended up having a really long career in radio and voice work. He also had a long gig doing the little Leprechaun in the Lucky Charms cereal commercials.

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RECALLING ORSON WELLES

By ARTHUR ANDERSON
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"Go home, dear boy."

It was November 1937, close to two o'clock in the morning. The Mercury Theatre actors had been wearily rehearsing over and over some fine points in the new modern-dress production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, ignoring Actors' Equity overtime rules in order to satisfy Orson Welles, their 22-year-old director. I was the youngest member of the Mercury, and when Orson by chance noticed me, yawning in one of the theatre's orchestra seats, he at once dismissed me until the following day. Whatever truth there may be in descriptions of George Orson Welles as self-absorbed, autocratic, skittish, undependable and unreasonable, it is also true that he showed only kindness to me.

My first encounter with Orson (I called him "Mr. Welles" in those days, as children were taught to address adults) had been in 1936 on Peter Absolute, aired Sunday afternoons on NBC's Red Network. I had the title role of a little orphan boy in the days of the Erie Canal. Orson played Rex Dakolar, an English actor with a waspish temper who despised the hardships of touring in the American provinces. He was excellent, and very amusing. I was thirteen years old.

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Wellesnet is pleased to be able to share this exclusive report from Chris Welles Feder, who attended the New York premiere and after party of Richard Linklater's new movie, Me and Orson Welles, due to the efforts of your obedient servant.

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ME AND ORSON WELLES premiere

By Chris Welles Feder
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The premiere was held at the Clearview Theater at 260 West 23rd Street in Manhattan on Monday evening, November 23rd. I arrived a few minutes before Zac Efron who was greeted by the media like a megastar. Photographers lined up five deep to take his picture, and the flashbulbs going off in his face and all around him must have been blinding. Zac looked like a dazed deer caught in a car’s headlights, and it took a team of body guards to hold back the ravenous press and usher him safely inside the theater.

Before the movie began, Christian McKay had heard that I was in the audience. He came bounding down the aisle, practically leapfrogging over people to get to my seat. Then, pumping my hand, he told me how much it meant to him that I was there. “This makes my evening!” he declared. We made plans to meet later at the party.

I enjoyed the movie and found it well-paced and entertaining. Zac Efron is most appealing and gives a sensitive and convincing performance. I felt the movie worked best as a coming-of-age story involving Zac’s character and Clare Danes’ (both entirely fictional as I am sure you know). I was also fascinated by the reconstruction of the Mercury’s Julius Caesar in modern dess, which I found well done. (Zac told me later that there had originally been a lot more footage of Julius Caesar, but it was cut, unfortunately, in the final version.)

As I am sure you will understand, it is difficult for me to be objective about a portrayal of my father in a fictional movie, especially when the Orson Welles character is presented as a sacré monstre (holy monster). Director Richard Linklater was equal to the task of telling a coming-of-age story but not, I feel, of delving into the Orson Welles character and helping us better understand what makes him tick. As a result, we end up with a caricature. Instead of taking the novel on which the movie is based at face value, as well as buying into the prevailing myths surrounding Orson Welles, Linklater might have gone deeper into his subject and given us a more complex and substantive portrait of a theatrical genius.

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Many thanks to Paul Condon of Dublin, Ireland for alerting us to the retrospective of Orson Welles films that will be screening in Dublin this month under the auspices of The Irish Film Institute.

Chimes at Midnight is one of only three Welles' movies that will not be shown, the others being Othello and Filming Othello.

This is unfortunate since Welles directed a stage version of Chimes at Midnight at the Gaiety Theater in Dublin in 1960.

Of course, anyone who has read any of the numerous Orson Welles biographies will also know that Welles made his professional acting debut in Dublin at the Gate Theatre, in October of 1931.

To celebrate the Irish Film Institutes Welles retrospective, here is what the great Irish actor Michael MacLiammoir recounts about his first meeting with Orson Welles in his book All For Hecuba; An Irish Theatrical Autobiography, published by Methuen in 1946.

It should also be noted that Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, the two founders of Dublin's Gate Theater remained friends with Welles throughout his life and were featured in Orson Welles's last completed essay film, Filming Othello.

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...We ransacked our lists for nights for the (part of the) Duke (in JEW SUSS) and could find no one. And it was not, I think, until I was painting the last pieces for The Melians, and the plans for the following production had been all but changed, that Hilton walked into the scene dock one day and said, 'Somebody strange has arrived from America; come and see what you think of it.' 'What,' I asked, 'is it?' 'Tall, young, fat: says he's been with the Guild Theatre in New York. Don't believe a word of it, but he's interesting. I want him to give me an audition. Says he's been in Connemara with a donkey, and I don't see what that's got to do with me. Come and have a look at him.'

We found, as he had hinted, a very tall young man with a chubby face, full powerful lips, and disconcerting Chinese eyes. His hands were enormous and very beautifully shaped, like so many American hands; they were coloured like champagne and moved with a sort of controlled abandon never seen in a European. The voice, with its brazen transatlantic sonority, was already that of a preacher, a leader, a man of power; it bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air of the scene dock as though it would crush down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor; he moved in a leisurely manner from foot to foot and surveyed us with magnificent patience as though here was our chance to do something beautiful at last-yes, sir-and were we going to take it? Well, well, just too bad for us if we let the moment slip. And all this did not come from mere youth, though the chubby tea-rose cheeks were as satin-like as though the razor had never known them -that was the big moment waiting for the razor-but from some ageless and superb inner confidence that no one could blow out. It was unquenchable. That was his secret. He knew that he was precisely what he himself would have chosen to be had God consulted him on the subject at his birth; he fully appreciated and approved what had been bestowed, and realized that he couldn't have done the job better himself, in fact he would not have changed a single item. Whether we and the world felt the same-well, that was for us to decide.

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Màscares (Masks)

Masks directed by Elisabet Cabeza and Welles's scholar Esteve Riambau, will screen at at the San Sebastian Film festival in the "New Directors" section on September 22, 23 and 24. Anyone in Spain who sees it is encouraged to send us a report.

You can see the trailer, in Spanish HERE.

The program notes from the Festival can be seen HERE.

Actors, like magicians, never reveal their tricks. The accomplished Spanish stage actor José María Pou has made an exception in allowing the camera to film him preparing a stage performance in which he takes on the part of the great movie magician, Orson Welles.

The action of Màscares unfolds backstage, in a place hidden from the eyes of the audience where the actor begins to become the part that will invoke his character. Magic, with tricks, but magic nevertheless.

From the directors of La doble vida del faquir (2005).

The basis for Màscares (Masks) is Richard France's play Obediently Yours, Orson Welles, which has been translated into German, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish. It is an original work by the playwright, scholar and narrator Richard France, who established himself as a leading authority on the life and works of Orson Welles, with the publication of “The Theatre of Orson Welles” and “Orson Welles on Shakespeare.”

The extraordinary Spanish actor, José María Pou, takes on the challenge of playing the artistic genius who was Orson Welles. José María Pou has throughout his career, played great men, including King Lear, the architect in The Goat and the like-able professor in The History Boys, all of which have been performed at the Arriaga Theater.

Wellesnet contributor Leslie Weisman gave this report about Welles's scholar Esteve Riambau's "masterfully detailed PowerPoint presentation" of Don Quixote that was shown at the Locarno Film Festival tribute to Orson Welles:

Esteve Riambau provided a scene-by-scene reconstruction of Don Quixote, contextualizing it within the temporal framework of Welles' other projects (Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil, Around the World in 80 Days) and world events. Riambau drew telling parallels between "Quixote" and Welles' other films, including a fondness for chimerical ambitions; Sancho Panza as the Spanish equivalent of Sir John Falstaff; film itself as a hall of mirrors; and Welles' love for Spain, and found that Welles had reinterpreted the Don's windmills as the cinema screen.

With the release of Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles now scheduled for November 25, 2009, here is an article Welles and John Houseman wrote for The New York Times to announce the birth of the Mercury Theatre in 1937.

Updates about Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles can be found on their official Facebook page HERE.

You can also see pictures from the Orson Welles production of Julius Caesar as well as Me and Orson Welles at the Wellesnet Facebook page HERE.

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PLAN FOR A NEW THEATRE

The Mercury Will Attempt to Arouse the Interest of a Wider Audience

By Orson Welles and John Houseman

Sunday August 29, 1937 -- The New York Times

When its doors open early in November, the Mercury Theatre will expect to play to the same audience that during the last two seasons stood to see Doctor Faustus, Murder in the Cathedral and the Negro Macbeth.

It was surprising that they came in such numbers, but that was not the only surprising thing about this audience. It was fresh. It was eager. To anyone who saw it night after night as we did, it was apparent that this was not the regular Broadway crowd taking in the hits of the moment. Even less was it the special audience one had learned to associate with "classical revivals." (A million people do not make a special audience.) One had the feeling, every night, that here were people on a voyage of discovery in the theatre... people who either had never been to the theatre at all or who, for one reason or another, had ignored it for many seasons.

By filling out the questionnaires we placed in their programs during the run of Doctor Faustus some forty thousand of them made their theatrical confessions to us. A large number professed themselves disappointed in the regular run of Broadway plays but stated that the theatre had once again assumed importance for them with the productions of the Federal Theatre. We asked for specific suggestions: the overwhelming majority of their requests was for "more classical plays," "classical plays excitingly produced," and "great plays of the past produced in a modern way."
This is the audience the Mercury Theatre will try to satisfy.

We shall produce four or five plays each season. Most of these will be plays of the past— preferably those which seem to have emotional or factual bearing on contemporary life. While a socially unconscious theatre would be intolerable, there will be no substitution of social consciousness for drama... We prefer not to fix our program rigidly too far ahead. New plays and new ideas may turn up any day. But we do know that our first production will be Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. As in Faustus, by the use of apron, lighting, sound devices, music, etc., we hope to give this production much of the speed and violence it must have had on the Elizabethan stage. The Roman Senators when they murder the Dictator will not be clad (any more than were the Elizabethan actors) in traditional nineteenth-century stage togas.

Next we hope, with George Bernard Shaw's consent, to produce what we consider his most important play, Heartbreak House. Also William Gillette's Too Much Johnson, Webster's Duchess of Malfi—one of the great horror plays of all time— and Ben Jonson's farce The Silent Woman. We expect to run our first play between four and six weeks. After that, without clinging to the European system of revolving repertory with its disturbing nightly changes of bill, the Mercury Theatre expects to maintain a repertory of its current season's productions. However at no time will more than two different plays be seen in one week.

We expect to occupy a theatre of medium size on the edge of the Broadway district. With a top price of two dollars, there will be four hundred good seats at fifty cents, seventy-five cents and one dollar available at every performance.

In honor of Sir John Falstaff....

---Christopher Lee

***

Queen Elizabeth II of England has bestowed Knighthood honors on one of my very favorite actors, SIR CHRISTOPHER LEE, who is well known to Wellesnet readers for appearing in Orson Welles's never finished television movie Moby Dick-Rehearsed.

Lee was also was featured in Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. Of course, three years after appearing in Welles's Moby Dick, Lee became world famous as "Count Dracula," which ironically, Welles had played so well on the radio way back in 1938.

What I find especially interesting is how English actors have always embraced horror films. Throughout the seventies, English actors were never "afraid" to be in a horror picture. In fact all of the great acting Knights appeared in horror and fantasy films.

Most significantly, they include:

Sir Ralph Richardson

Started out way back in 1933 with The Ghoul opposite Boris Karloff, made Things to Come with Raymond Massey in 1936, Tales From the Crypt in 1971 with Peter Cushing, and played a Wizard in Dragonslayer. Greystoke, one of his final films brought him an Oscar nomination in 1984, but no Oscar.

Sir Laurence Olivier

Played Van Helsing in Dracula, taking over a role made far more famous by Peter Cushing in the 1958 version of Dracula. Ironically, Olivier used Peter Cushing in his film version of Hamlet, as Osiric, in 1948 and as Clarence in Richard III on stage at the Old Vic. Olivier also played Zeus in Ray Harryhausen's Clash of the Titans, a role he was ideal for, although by then he was getting on in years.

Sir John Gielgud

Gielgud acted with Christopher Lee in The Far Pavillions. However, long before that he was the Chief of Police in Frankenstein: The True Story and also appeared in a 1984 English TV movie of Frankenstein with David Warner as The Monster. He was also friends with Coral Browne, the wife of Vincent Price, and was set to act in the role Price eventually played in The Whales of August.

Sir Alec Guinness

Ironically, this great actor is best remembered in America for Star Wars, more than for his masterful Oscar-winning performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

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In these excerpts from Sir John Gielgud's wonderful book, A Life in Letters, which covers his entire career from 1930 to 1999, we get to see how his view of Orson Welles changed, starting from when he first saw Citizen Kane in 1941, to his being somewhat put off by Welles's antics at their first meeting, until he finally fell completely under Welles's spell when he worked with him as a director on Chimes at Midnight.

The letters also show that Gielgud always hoped to work with Welles again, and was especially keen on having Welles direct him as Prospero in a film version of The Tempest.

Strangely enough, after winning an Oscar for Arthur in 1982, Gielgud was chosen to replace Welles as the spokesman for Paul Masson wines on American TV, which Gielgud admits was sometimes a humiliating experience, but obviously one that paid both him and Welles a great deal of money.

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London, October 25, 1941

To Alec Guinness:

…London is full of people and plays and films in comparative abundance, rather a joy after being away for so many weeks. …Citizen Kane is quite unimaginably good, and an amazing feat all round on the part of Welles and his really brilliant cast. You must not fail to see it.

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New York, January 1, 1951

To His Mother:

I saw Orson Welles’ film of Macbeth. Not uninteresting and some fine effects of battle and Birnam Wood, but slow and dragged out despite huge cuts and transpositions and the acting unmoving and conventional. Splendid costumes but the fine language is defeated by the limitations of the screen!

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London, November 11, 1951

To Stark Young:

Orson Welles has had a certain amount of success with his Othello (the stage version at London’s St. James Theater) – I have not been able to see it myself. I gather he promises better than he can perform and the thunder grumbles but never breaks, and he is ill disciplined, they say, in the theatre and something of a terror to his company and management. Still the enfant terrible of Hollywood. He amused me when I met him, but he was rather stupidly touchy and lacked humility, must have the floor all the time or he fears he is not noticed. A pity, for he is obviously extremely intelligent and full of (rather disorderly) talent in many directions.

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Simon Callow, who is a great friend of Wellesnet, has sent along the biggest contribution I've yet to receive towards helping keep the site active and alive on the web. I know I've mentioned to everyone who has contributed to Wellesnet that we hope to add more pictures to the site in the future. Well, to my own surprise I found some very rare pictures I had never seen, that Jeff posted to the site from two brothers who were on the set of Chimes at Midnight in 1965.

These photos are especially interesting as they not only show Welles directing in his costume as Falstaff (and according to Keith Baxter, Welles designed all the costumes for Chimes himself), but several of them are also in color, giving us a unique view of the costumes and scenery. They can be viewed at Wellesnet HERE

Now, if there is ever an American DVD release for Chimes at Midnight, the producers might want to get in touch with Marc and Bruno Yasoni about including the rare production photos they took on location in Spain.

Anyway, while talking to Mr. Callow, I asked him whether his biography of Orson Welles would be concluded in one or two more volumes. He said there will definitely only be one more book, which will certainly make for an epic final volume in his acclaimed trilogy about the life and work of Orson Welles.

The last book in the trilogy, will of course, cover Welles's staging of Chimes at Midnight in Belfast and Dublin in 1960 and the subsequent movie version Welles made in Spain in 1965, which many critics (and Welles himself) considered to be his finest work in the cinema.

In 1998, inspired by Welles version of Chimes at Midnight, Simon Callow had the chance to tackle the role of Sir John Falstaff for the first time. He relates the specific details about playing Falstaff in this instructive TALK he gave at London's National Theater in 2003.

Mr. Callow was appearing at the National Theater to talk about the two (then) recent books he wrote for the Faber and Faber series, Actors on Shakespeare. Callow chose to write about Shakespeare's King Henry the IV Part One, and King Henry the IV Part Two. Both books are still available at AMAZON for quite a reasonable price.

Here is Simon Callow's forward to the books:

FOREWORD

My qualifications for writing this volume are a little oblique. Some years ago at the Chichester Festival Theatre I played Falstaff in a production of Orson Welles’s CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, a play drawn from HENRY IV Parts I and II, which he had directed on stage some years before shooting the film of the same name. Reviving Welles’s version seemed like a good idea at the time, but for a number of reasons, it failed rather badly – as indeed had the original production in Belfast and Dublin. On the face of it, the notion of compressing the two plays into one to focus on the relationship between Hal and Falstaff is attractive; many of the most memorable passages in the plays are in the scenes between them, and Welles was careful to include the scenes between the ailing king and his son as a counterpoint. In practice, though, however ably staged and acted, it creates an unwieldy vehicle which lumbers across the stage unhappily and unrhythmically, dangerously risking over-exposure for the Fat Knight and removing the context in which events unfold. (The film, of course, is quite a different matter: the entirely different dramaturgical demands of the medium made Welles’s selective process not only feasible but inevitable).

My discomfort in the performance constantly led me back to the full texts – pointlessly, since it was by this time impossible to restore anything more than a line or two. But it did give me a peculiarly keen appreciation of Shakespeare’s craftsmanship, and some insight into why he does what he does in the very particular way in which he does it. Some of the fruits of that painful reading are to be found in the following pages. In essence, I aim to take the reader through the play from the point of view of a practitioner, not becoming entangled in the tricky logistics of the actual staging, but presenting a practical view of the play, a sort of groundwork for a production, which may bring out some of the ways in which the play works. Anyone who attempts to write in this way is consciously or unconsciously treading in the footsteps of Harley Granville-Barker, for actors and directors greatest and most useful of all Shakespearean commentators: a tough act to follow, to be sure, but the most inspiring of models (fortunately, perhaps, for me, he never wrote about HENRY IV).

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As noted above, Simon Callow's first appearance as Falstaff was in 1998 at the Chichester Festival Theatre, where Keith Baxter, graduated from playing Prince Hal in Welles film to taking on the role of his own father, King Henry IV.

Mr. Baxter's very insightful comments about working with Orson Welles on Chimes at Midnight can be found in Leslie Weisman's report for Wellesnet HERE.

The Simon Callow/Keith Baxter version of Chimes at Midnight opened in August, 1998 in Chichester, with the following cast:

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT – By Orson Welles, adapted from plays by William Shakespeare. Directed by Patrick Garland.

Simon Callow (Falstaff), Keith Baxter (King Henry IV), Tam Williams (Prince Hal), Tristan Gemmill (Hotspur) Sarah Badel (Mistress Quickly), David Weston (Bardolph), Rowland Davies, Timothy Bateson, Rebecca Egan, John Warner.

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In doing research for the part, Simon Callow also wrote the following article which gives us some fascinating insights into the origins of Falstaff.

THE FAT MAN IN HISTORY

Falstaff is one of the great characters of Western literature, but he is not Shakespeare's exclusive creation. As Simon Callow prepares to play him, he explores the ancient roots of a mythic figure

By SIMON CALLOW
The Independent - 11 August 1998

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Sir John Falstaff has been widely described as Shakespeare's greatest creation and his best loved character, which in the circumstances is no mean claim. The adjective "Falstaffian" has long passed into the language. We all know what it means: fat and frolicsome, gloriously drunk, bawdy, boastful, mendacious; disgraceful but irresistible; above all, fun. Not only, as he says in Henry IV Part Two, witty in himself, "but the cause that wit is in other men," Falstaff provokes cascades of comparisons both from critics and from his fellow characters in the play; to see him is to be irresistibly impelled to describe him.

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