Orson Welles, Volume 3 Vol. 3

In One-Man Band, the third volume in his epic and all-inclusive survey of Orson Welles' life and work, Simon Callow again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex, contradictory artists of the twentieth century, looking closely at the glorious triumphs and the spectacular failures of an almost impossibly ambitious one-man assault on one medium after another - theatre, radio, film, television - even, at one point, ballet - in each of which (except, perhaps ballet) his radical and original approach opened up new directions and hitherto unglimpsed possibilities. The book begins with Welles' self-exile from America, and his realisation that he could only function to his own satisfaction as an independent film-maker, a one-man band, in fact, which committed him to a perpetual cycle of money-raising; by 1964, he had filmed Othello, which took three years to complete, Mr Arkadin, the biggest conundrum in his output, and his masterpiece Chimes at Midnight, which enshrined his lifelong passion for the character of Sir John Falstaff and his creator, as well as his masterpiece in another genre, Touch of Evil, his one return to Hollywood, like all too many of his films wrested from his grasp and re-edited. Along the way he made inroads into the fledgling medium of television - including the little-known and highly original Fountain of Youth - and a number of stage plays, of which his 1955 London Moby-Dick is considered by theatre historians to be one of the seminal productions of the century. His private life was as spectacularly complex and dramatic as his professional life. The book shows what it was like to be around Welles, and, with a complexity and precision rarely attempted before, what it was like to be him, in which lies the answer to the old riddle: whatever happened to Orson Welles?