Orson Welles as King Lear in Peter Brook’s 1953 Omnibus television production, left, and 32 years later in a test photo taken by Gary Graver in Hollywood in 1985.
By RAY KELLY
A film adaptation of King Lear, Shakespeare’s tale of old age and mortality, was one of the last projects conceived by Orson Welles.
Welles had high hopes for the project, which was to have been backed by French government-owned television. When that failed to happen, he spent his final days trying to secure new backing.
At Welles’ memorial service at the Directors Guild of America Theater on November 2, 1985, longtime companion Oja Kodar told attendees that Welles had realized the French government was not sincere in its offer earlier that year to co-produce the film.
She made an emotionally charged attack on the Mitterrand administration — as recounted in Joseph McBride’s book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career.
In a letter, read by Kodar at the memorial service, Welles complained, “In the 55 years of my professional career, I have never, not even in the worst days in the old Hollywood, encountered such a humiliating inflexibility. Need I say that this is a bitter disappointment to one who has until now received so much heartwarming and generous cooperation in France. … There is no longer any hope that in this affair a constructive relationship is possible.”
Dominique Antoine, am executive producer on The Other Side of the Wind, has she believes the betrayal Welles felt contributed to his death on October 10, 1985.
There is ample evidence Welles had not give up hope of filming King Lear, even in his final days.
Researcher Robert Kroll has uncovered a letter written nine days before Welles’ passing in which he made an appeal to a Hungarian production company.
Hours before his death, Welles told longtime friend Roger Hill that he found a potential backer for King Lear.
“I continue to fight the good fight to find the money to complete a few of my films and begin Lear and Cradle (Will Rock),” said Welles, as recounted in Todd Tarbox’s book Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts. “I must spend what time I have left finding ‘end money’ for what’s already begun and solid backers for Lear and Cradle.
According to cinematographer Gary Graver, a few minutes of silent test footage of King Lear was shot — and subsequently lost.
“Orson was planning to shoot all the close-ups of the actors in King Lear on videotape, so he could do many, many takes. All the wide shots, the big massive scenes, and all the pageantry would be done in 35mm black & white,” Graver told Lawrence French in a Wellesnet interview. “We did tests on three-quarter inch color videotape, and transferred it to 35mm black and white, and it came out gorgeous. We just used two lights for the close-ups. Image Transfer over here on Lankershim Boulevard thought it was the best tape to film transfer that they’d ever seen.”
Graver added, “But for some reason, we never picked up that footage, so the lab just kept it. I remember after we had watched it, Orson said, ‘Ok, lets go Gary,’ and we left, and I didn’t take it with me. That was in the early ’80s, and the lab has long since gone out of business. It wasn’t very long, only about five or six minutes. It was just Orson playing Lear, but back in those days, videotape was only in color, so they printed it for us on 35mm black and white film. Now, all that I have left from King Lear are some stills from that test. A few of those stills are on my DVD, Working With Orson Welles.”
Welles was no stranger to the role having played Lear on radio in 1946, later in an abridged 1953 television production; and again in his own a short-lived New York stage production in 1956.
In March 1985, he videotaped a six-minute proposal for prospective producers in the living room of his Hollywood home, explaining directly to the camera how he wanted to adapt the play. Below are comments about what he planned from his pitch reel.
ORSON WELLES: King Lear is Shakespeare’s masterpiece and, stripped of its classical or stage trappings, it’s as strong now and as simple and as timeless as any story ever told. And what is simple for the story of King Lear — what is truly important — is not that the tragic hero is an old king, but that he’s an old man. Just such an amiable, egocentric family tyrant as holds sway in the domestic scene even nowadays. Of course, we’ve been so famously liberated from the spice of the forbidden that nothing can be counted as truly obscene. But there is one exception: death.
“Death” is our only dirty word. And King Lear is about death and the approach of death, and about power and the loss of power, and about love. In our consumer society we are encouraged to forget that we will ever die, and old age can be postponed by the right face cream. And when it finally does come, we’re encouraged to look forward to a long and lovely sunset.
“Old age,” said Charles de Gaulle, “old age is a ship wreck” — and he knew whereof he spoke. The elderly are even more self-regarding than the young. To their dependents the elderly call out for love, for more love than they can possibly receive, and for more than they are likely — or capable— of giving back. When old age tempts or forces a man to give away the very source of his ascendancy over the young — his power— it’s they, the young, who are the tyrants, and he, who was all-powerful, becomes a pensioner.
Of all the aches of the elderly, the loss of power is the most terrible to bear. The strong old man, the leader of the tribe— the city, the church, the state, the political party, or corporation— demands love as a tyrant demands tribute; and, bereft of power, he must, like Lear, plead for it like a beggar. When, by self-abdication or forced retirement, such a one is suddenly deprived of his own life-sustaining tyranny, he can only flounder to the grave, struggling vainly to exact from those who have been the subjects of his whim some portion of that suffocating pity he now feels for himself. Impotent, from side to side he swings like the clapper in a bell, ringing soundlessly. He is then a castaway, banished to the desert island of his loneliness, cast out indeed from his own personal identity. “Who is it?” cries the old King Lear. “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” He has given up not only his crown; he has given up himself.
Well, you must forgive me if I’ve been telling you what our film will be about. To tell you what it’ll be like won’t be so easy. I can’t really describe something which just at the moment is only in my mind. Even with a movie already on the screen, words don’t get us very far. What I can tell you, though, is what this movie will not be. In any sense of the word, it will not be what is called a “costume movie.”
That doesn’t mean that the characters are going to wear blue jeans; it does mean that a story so sharply modern in its relevancy, so universal in its simple, rock-bottom humanity, will not be burdened with the timeworn baggage of theatrical tradition. It will be just as free from the various forms of cinematic rhetoric — my own as well as the others — which have already accumulated in the history of these translations of Shakespeare into film. What we’ll be giving you, then, is something new: Shakespeare addressed directly and uniquely to the sensibility of our own particular day.
The camera language will be intimate, extremely intimate, rather than grandiose. The tone will be at once epic in its stark simplicity and almost ferociously down-to-earth. In a word, not only a new kind of Shakespeare, but a new kind of film. I intend to keep the promise, and there’s some basis for some optimism in the fact that I’ve invested so much time and energy and love in its preparation. Most importantly, the material from which this project will be realized is quite simply the greatest drama ever written.
Please forgive my outrageous lack of modesty, and thank you for giving me so much of your kind attention.
As always, I remain your obedient servant,
Orson Welles
Scripts, three budgets (dated May 1984, July 1985 and August 1985), production sheets, costume sketches and French TV producer Philippe Dussart’s cinematography estimate can be found in the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan. One budget called for shooting King Lear in Spain and on a British soundstage at a cost of $1.78 million.
For his film, Welles wanted to cast Kodar as Cordelia, the youngest of Lear’s three daughters, and, perhaps, magician Abb Dickson as The Fool.
Dickson told interviewer Peter Prescott Tonguette (Orson Welles Remembered) that Welles filmed him in costume as The Fool speaking with Lear. “Boy, I wish I knew who had those.”
Welles touched upon his plans for King Lear in a 1982 interview with Bill Krohn, longtime Hollywood correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma. An expanded version later appeared in the Munich Film Museum book The Unknown Orson Welles.
Can you tell us about your plans to do King Lear as a film?
I don’t want to go into it at length, because the more I talk about a picture before I make it, the more I steal from it. But the idea is that it’s going to be done for the small screen, but not as a TV movie. It’s cassettes as much as small screens, but it will work in a big theatre. It’s going to be a very intimate, interior version of the tragedy, rather than an operatic one.
That’s interesting, because it’s often referred to as a closet drama.
I’ve done King Lear four times now in various forms, and you always think you have to be louder than the storm. This will be just the opposite. And very much more a study of old age than I’ve ever done it before.
It’s often called an “un-performable play”.
I know, and that’s nonsense, I’ve seen it work very well, and I think it worked very well for me once. I saw it marvelously done once, by quite a bad actor.
Who was that?
Fritz Weaver.
You’re kidding.
And he did it without any idea of directorial line or anything. They simply spoke the words out loud and clear and it thrilled me to my bones.
And without any idea that they were performing an un-performable play?
That’s right! It never crossed their minds that it was King Lear that night. I think that’s what we must erase from our minds, that it’s un-performable.
And all the ideas of the orthodox Shakespeareans.
Yes, the orthodox Shakespeareans and teachers more than anybody else. Actors don’t fail in it as regularly as they do in Macbeth, you know; but they fail in it. One of the great problems of course is that it’s not a star part like Hamlet is. It requires five star actors. There’s just no way of having a supporting cast. There are tremendous parts in it, you know. They have to be played not just well, they have to be played marvelously.
It will be very intimate without a tiny piece of detail, absolutely without any detail whatever. In other words it will be more bare than an Elizabethan production, because you would have seen the Globe Theater behind (in a Elizabethan staging). I’m very fond of silhouettes I’ve always been mad about them. So it’s on a small screen and a lot of the mise-en-scene will have the people that don’t count in silhouette, And no scenery at all. That doesn’t mean a TV soundstage with a spotlight on somebody, either. It’s a little hard to explain: An intimate, domestic tragedy, rather than an epic. The epic quality has to be in its poetry and in the minds of the audience; it’s the only way to reach people today with that play. I don’t think people have the ear or the taste for the operatic approach to it.
That’s interesting, because we happen to be in a time of incredible spectacles in film, and I was wondering…
Yes, and this will be the anti-spectacle. Much more severe than anything I’ve ever done before. It will just be the actors, and that’s all, absolutely all.
. . . I keep reminding myself that I am getting old, and you can’t be too old when you play King Lear (laughs).
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Below are excerpts from Welles’ three previous performances as King Lear.
First, a nearly six-minute excerpt from Welles’ New York stage production of King Lear, as performed live on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 5, 1956. Welles had sprained his ankles and he relied on a crutch when he approached Sullivan at the end.
Next is an audio stream of Scenes from King Lear, which aired on September 13, 1946 as the final episode of the Mercury Summer Theatre. Welles is joined in the radio broadcast by Agnes Moorehead, William Alland and Edgar Barrier.
Finally, the Omnibus production of King Lear starring Orson Welles. It aired on CBS on October 18, 1953. The cast included Micheál Mac Liammóir, Natasha Parry, Arnold Moss and Beatrice Straight.
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