It looks at the remarkable genius of Orson Welles on the eve of his centenary - the enigma of his career as a Hollywood star, a Hollywood director (for some a Hollywood failure), and a crucially important independent filmmaker. Orson Welles's life was magical: a musical prodigy at age ten, a director of Shakespeare at fourteen, a painter at sixteen, a star of stage and radio at twenty, romances with some of the most beautiful women in the world, including...

"In the history of American popular culture, there is no more dramatic story--no swifter or loftier ascent to the pinnacle of success and no more tragic downfall--than that of Orson Welles. In this magisterial biography, Patrick McGilligan brings young Orson into focus as never before. He chronicles Welles's early life growing up in Wisconsin and Illinois as the son of an alcoholic industrialist and a radical suffragist and classical musician, and...

October, 1938. Orson Welles, known as radio's The Shadow, is accused of killing his mistress on the night of his War of the Worlds broadcast. Only Walter Gibson, The Shadow's creator, knows if Welles is truly guilty.

"Based on long-lost recordings, a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateurThere have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.Here...