Coordinates	23°31′58″N46°47′58″N
name	Orson Welles
birth date	May 06, 1915
birth place
death date	October 10, 1985
death place
death cause	Heart attack
alma mater	Todd School for Boys
occupation	Actor, director, writer, producer, voice actor
years active	1931–85
spouse	Virginia Nicholson (1934–40)Rita Hayworth (1943–48)Paola Mori (1955–85)
height	6'1"
partner	Dolores del Río (1938–41)Oja Kodar (1966–85)
parents	Richard Hodgdon Head Welles,Beatrice Ives
awards	1941 Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for Citizen Kane 1970 Academy Honorary Award
influences	John Ford, William Shakespeare, Fritz Lang, Joseph Conrad
influenced	Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese }}

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 October 10, 1985), best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio. Noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality, Welles is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished dramatic artists of the twentieth century, especially for his significant and influential early work—despite his notoriously contentious relationship with Hollywood. His distinctive directorial style featured layered, nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unique camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. Welles's long career in film is noted for his struggle for artistic control in the face of pressure from studios. Many of his films were heavily edited and others left unreleased. He has been praised as a major creative force and as "the ultimate auteur."

After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.

Citizen Kane (1941), his first film with RKO, in which he starred in the role of Charles Foster Kane, is often considered the greatest film ever made. Several of his other films, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Touch of Evil (1958), Chimes at Midnight (1965), and F for Fake (1974), are also widely considered to be masterpieces.

In 2002, he was voted the greatest film director of all time in two separate British Film Institute polls among directors and critics, and a wide survey of critical consensus, best-of lists, and historical retrospectives calls him the most acclaimed director of all time. Well known for his baritone voice, Welles was also an extremely well regarded actor and was voted number 16 in AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list of the greatest American film actors of all time. He was also a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor and an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety shows in the war years.

Early life

Welles was born May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, son of Richard Hodgdon Head Welles (1873, Missouri – December 28, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) and Beatrice Ives (1882 or 1883, Springfield, Illinois – May 10, 1924, Chicago, Illinois). His family was raised Roman Catholic. Despite his parents' affluence, Welles encountered many hardships in childhood. In 1919, his parents separated and moved to Chicago. His father, who had made a fortune as the inventor of a popular bicycle lamp, became an alcoholic and stopped working. Welles's mother, a concert pianist, played during lectures by Dudley Crafts Watson at the Chicago Art Institute to support her son and herself (the oldest Welles boy, "Dickie", had been institutionalized at an early age because he had learning difficulties). Beatrice died of jaundice in 1924 in a Chicago hospital a few days after Welles's ninth birthday. After his mother's death, Welles ceased pursuing his interest in music. He was taken in by Dudley Crafts Watson and lived with the family at Watson's family home, "Trillium Dell", on Marshman Avenue in Highland Park, Illinois. At the age of ten, Orson with Watson's third daughter, Marjorie (of the same age), ran away from home. They were found a week later, singing and dancing for money on a street corner in Milwaukee. His father died when Orson was 15 during the summer after Orson's graduation from Todd School for Boys, an independent school in Woodstock, Illinois. Maurice Bernstein, a physician from Chicago, became his guardian.

At Todd School, Welles came under the influence of Roger Hill, a teacher who later became Todd's headmaster. Hill provided Welles with an ad hoc educational environment that proved invaluable to his creative experience, allowing Welles to concentrate on subjects that interested him. Welles performed and staged his first theatrical experiments and productions there. Following graduation from Todd, Welles was awarded a scholarship to Harvard University. Rather than enrolling, he chose to travel. Later, he briefly studied for a time at the Art Institute of Chicago. He returned a number of times to Woodstock to direct his alma mater's student productions.

Early career (1931–1934)

After his father's death, Welles traveled to Europe with the aid of a small inheritance. Welles later reported that while on a walking and painting trip through Ireland, he strode into the Gate Theatre in Dublin and claimed he was a Broadway star. The manager of Gate, Hilton Edwards, later said he didn't believe him but was impressed by his brashness and some impassioned quality in his audition. Welles made his stage debut at the Gate in 1931, appearing in Jew Suss as the Duke. He acted to great acclaim, which reached the United States. He performed smaller supporting roles as well. On returning to the United States he found his fame ephemeral and turned to a writing project at Todd School that would become the immensely successful Everybody's Shakespeare and subsequently, The Mercury Shakespeare. Welles traveled to North Africa while working on thousands of illustrations for the Everybody's Shakespeare series of educational books, a series that remained in print for decades.

An introduction by Thornton Wilder led Welles to the New York stage. In 1933, he toured in three off-Broadway productions with Katharine Cornell's company, including two roles in Romeo and Juliet. Restless and impatient when the planned Broadway opening of Romeo and Juliet was canceled, Welles staged a drama festival of his own with the Todd School, inviting Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards from Dublin's Gate Theatre to appear, along with New York stage luminaries. It was a roaring success. The subsequent revival of Cornell's Romeo and Juliet brought Welles to the notice of John Houseman, who was casting for an unusual lead actor for the lead role in the Federal Theatre Project.

By 1935 Welles was supplementing his earnings in the theater as a radio actor in Manhattan, working with many of the actors who would later form the core of his Mercury Theatre. He married Chicago actress Virginia Nicholson in 1934 and that year he shot an eight-minute silent short film, The Hearts of Age with her. The couple had one daughter, Christopher. She made her only film appearance in 1948, taking the role of Macduff's son in Welles's film Macbeth and later became known as Chris Welles Feder, an author of educational materials for children.

Theatre and radio (1936–1940)

Federal Theatre Project

Macbeth

In 1936, the Federal Theatre Project (part of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration) put unemployed theater performers and employees to work. Welles was hired by John Houseman and assigned to direct a play for the Federal Theatre Project's Negro Theater Unit. He offered them Macbeth, in a production that became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, because Welles set it in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe, with voodoo witch doctors for the three Weird Sisters. Jack Carter played Macbeth. The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. The play was received rapturously and later toured the nation. When the lead actor, Maurice Ellis, fell ill on tour, Welles quickly boarded an airplane to fly to the location and stepped into the part playing the role in blackface. At the age of twenty, Welles was hailed as a prodigy. A few minutes of the Welles production of Macbeth was recorded on film in a 1937 documentary called We Work Again.

Collaboration with Aaron Copland

The young actor/director was chosen by the American composer Aaron Copland in 1937 to direct what is one of Copland's least known works, the opera The Second Hurricane composed for high school students of The Henry Street Settlement Music School in New York. Among the few adult performers in the production was actor Joseph Cotten, Welles's longtime friend and collaborator, who was paid $10 for his performance.

The Cradle Will Rock

After the success of Macbeth, Welles mounted the absurd farce Horse Eats Hat, an adaptation by Welles and Edwin Denby of Eugène Labiche's play, Un Chapeau de Paille d'Italie. He consolidated his "White Hope" reputation with Dr. Faustus, which used light as a prime unifying scenic element in a nearly blacked-out stage.

In 1937, he rehearsed Marc Blitzstein's highly political operetta, The Cradle Will Rock. Because of severe federal cutbacks in the Works Progress projects, the show's premiere at the Maxine Elliott Theatre was canceled. The theater was locked and guarded to prevent any of the government-purchased materials being used for a commercial production of the work. In a last-minute move, Welles announced to waiting ticket-holders that the show was being transferred to the Venice, about twenty blocks away. Some cast, as well as some crew and audience, walked the distance on foot. The union musicians refused to perform in a commercial theater for lower non-union government wages. The actors' union stated that the production belonged to the Federal Theater Project and could not be performed outside that context without permission. Lacking the participation of the union members, The Cradle Will Rock began with Blitzstein introducing the show and playing the piano accompaniment on stage with some cast members performing their parts from the audience. This impromptu performance was well received by its audience. It afterward played at the Venice for two weeks in the same informal way.

Mercury Theatre

Resigning from the Federal Theatre, Welles and Houseman formed the Mercury Theatre, of which Welles became executive producer and whose repertory company eventually included actors such as Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotten, Dolores del Río, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Frank Readick, Everett Sloane, Eustace Wyatt and Erskine Sanford, all of whom would continue to work for Welles for years. The first Mercury Theatre production was a melodramatic and heavily edited version of William Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar, set in a contemporary frame of fascist Italy. Cinna the Poet dies at the hands not of a mob but of a secret police force. According to Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna the Poet, "it stopped the show." The applause lasted more than ten minutes and the production was widely acclaimed.

In the second year of the Mercury Theater, Welles shifted his interests to radio as an actor, director and producer. He played Hamlet for CBS on The Columbia Workshop, while adapting and directing the play. In July 1937, the Mutual Network gave him a seven-week series to adapt Les Misérables, which he did with great success. That September, Mutual chose Welles to play Lamont Cranston, aka The Shadow, anonymously and in the summer of 1938 CBS gave him (and the Mercury Theatre) a weekly hour-long show to broadcast radio plays based on classic literary works. The show was titled The Mercury Theatre on the Air, with original music by Bernard Herrmann, who would continue working with Welles on radio and in films for years.

The War of the Worlds broadcast

Their October 30, 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells brought Welles instant fame. The combination of the news bulletin form of the performance with the between-breaks dial spinning habits of listeners from the rival and far more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy program, was later reported in the media to have created widespread confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction, although the extent of this confusion has recently come into question. Panic was reported to have spread (after citation from rumors) among many listeners who believed the news reports of a Martian invasion. The myth of the result created by the combination was reported as fact around the world and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a public speech a few months later. The 1970s "docu-drama" The Night That Panicked America was based on events centering around the production of, and events that resulted from, the program.

Welles's growing fame soon drew Hollywood offers, lures which the independent-minded Welles resisted at first. The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which had been a "sustaining show" (without sponsorship) was picked up by Campbell Soup and renamed The Campbell Playhouse.

On October 28, 1940, Welles met H.G. Wells in San Antonio, Texas; a local radio station KTSA recorded the conversation, which was likely the only meeting between the two.

Hollywood (1939–1948)

RKO Radio Pictures president George Schaefer eventually offered Welles what generally is considered the greatest contract ever offered to an untried director: complete artistic control. RKO signed Welles in a two-picture deal; including script, cast, crew, and most importantly, final cut, although Welles had a budget limit for his projects. With this contract in hand, Welles (and nearly the entire Mercury Theatre troupe) moved to Hollywood. He commuted weekly to New York to maintain his commitment to The Campbell Playhouse.

Welles toyed with various ideas for his first project for RKO Radio Pictures, settling on an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which he worked on in great detail. He planned to film the action with a subjective camera (a technique later used in the Robert Montgomery film Lady in the Lake). When a budget was drawn up, RKO's enthusiasm cooled because it was greater than the previously agreed limit. RKO also declined to approve another Welles project, The Smiler With the Knife, based on the Cecil Day-Lewis novel, ostensibly because RKO executives lacked faith in Lucille Ball's ability to carry the film as the leading lady.

In a sign of things to come, Welles left The Campbell Playhouse in 1940 due to creative differences with the sponsor. The show continued without him, produced by John Houseman. In perhaps another sign of things to come, Welles's first experience on a Hollywood film was narrator for RKO's 1940 production of The Swiss Family Robinson.

Citizen Kane

Production

RKO, having rejected Welles's first two movie proposals, agreed on the third offer, Citizen Kane, for which Welles co-wrote, produced, directed, and performed the lead role.

Welles found a suitable film project in an idea he conceived with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, (who was then writing radio plays for The Campbell Playhouse). Initially entitled The American, it eventually became Welles's first feature film (also his most famous and honored role), Citizen Kane (1941).

Mankiewicz based his original notion on an exposé of the life of William Randolph Hearst, whom he knew socially but came to hate, having once been great friends with Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Mankiewicz had been banished from her company because of his perpetual drunkenness. Mankiewicz, a notorious gossip, exacted revenge with his unflattering depiction of Davies in Citizen Kane for which Welles bore most of the criticisms. Welles also had a connection with Davies through his first wife.

Kane's megalomania was modeled loosely on Robert McCormick, Howard Hughes, and Joseph Pulitzer as Welles wanted to create a broad, complex character, intending to show him in the same scenes from several points of view. The use of multiple narrative perspectives in Conrad's Heart of Darkness influenced the treatment.

Supplying Mankiewicz with 300 pages of notes, Welles urged him to write the first draft of a screenplay under John Houseman, who was posted to ensure Mankiewicz stayed sober. On Welles's instruction, Houseman wrote the opening narration as a pastiche of The March of Time newsreels. Orson Welles explained to Peter Bogdanovich about the writers working separately by saying, "I left him on his own finally, because we'd started to waste too much time haggling. So, after mutual agreements on storyline and character, Mank went off with Houseman and did his version, while I stayed in Hollywood and wrote mine." Taking these drafts, Welles drastically condensed and rearranged them, then added scenes of his own. The industry accused Welles of underplaying Mankiewicz's contribution to the script, but Welles countered the attacks by saying, "At the end, naturally, I was the one making the picture, after all—who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank's and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own."

Charles Foster Kane is based loosely on parts of Hearst's life. Nonetheless, autobiographical allusions to Welles were worked in, most noticeably in the treatment of Kane's childhood and particularly, regarding his guardianship. Welles then added features from other famous American lives to create a general and mysterious personality, rather than the narrow journalistic portrait intended by Mankiewicz, whose first drafts included scandalous claims about the death of the film director Thomas Ince.

Once the script was completed, Welles attracted some of Hollywood's best technicians, including cinematographer Gregg Toland, who walked into Welles's office and announced he wanted to work on the picture. Welles later described Toland as "the fastest cameraman who ever lived." For the cast, Welles primarily used actors from his Mercury Theatre. He invited suggestions from everyone but only if they were directed through him. Filming Citizen Kane took ten weeks.

Reaction

Mankiewicz handed a copy of the final shooting script to his friend, Charles Lederer, husband of Welles's ex-wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as the nephew of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper saw a small ad in a newspaper for a preview screening of Citizen Kane and went. Hopper, realizing immediately that the film was based on features of Hearst's life, reported this back to him and he threatened to give "Hollywood, Private Lives" if that was what it wanted. Thus began the struggle over the attempted suppression of Citizen Kane.

Hearst's media outlets boycotted the film. They exerted enormous pressure on the Hollywood film community by threatening to expose fifteen years of suppressed scandals and the fact that most of the studio bosses were Jewish. At one point, the heads of the major studios jointly offered RKO the cost of the film in exchange for the negative and all existing prints, fully intending to burn them. RKO declined and the film was given a limited release. Hearst intimidated theater chains by threatening to ban advertising for any of their other films in any of his papers if they showed Citizen Kane.

The film was well-received critically, with Bosley Crowther, film critic for the New York Times calling it "close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood". By the time it reached the general public, though, the publicity had waned. It garnered nine Academy Award nominations (Orson nominated as a producer, director, writer, and actor), but won only for Best Original Screenplay, shared by Mankiewicz and Welles. Although it was largely ignored at the Academy Awards, Citizen Kane now is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Andrew Sarris called it "the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since The Birth of a Nation."

The delay in its release and its uneven distribution contributed to its average result at the box office, making back its budget and marketing, but RKO lost any chance of a major profit. The fact that Citizen Kane ignored many Hollywood conventions also meant that the film confused and angered the 1940s cinema public. Exhibitor response was scathing; most theater owners complained bitterly about the adverse audience reaction and the many walkouts. Only a few saw fit to acknowledge Welles's artistic technique. RKO shelved the film and did not re-release it until 1956.

During the 1950s, the film came to be seen by young French film critics such as François Truffaut as exemplifying the "auteur theory", in which the director is the "author" of a film. Truffaut, Godard and others inspired by Welles's example made their own films, giving birth to the Nouvelle Vague. In the 1960s Citizen Kane became popular on college campuses as a film-study exercise and as an entertainment subject. Its frequent revivals on television, home video, and DVD have enhanced its "classic" status and ultimately it recouped its costs. The film still is considered by most film critics and historians to be one of the greatest motion pictures in cinema history.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Welles's second film for RKO was The Magnificent Ambersons, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington. George Schaefer hoped to make money with this film, since he lost money with Citizen Kane. Ambersons already had been adapted for The Campbell Playhouse by Welles for the stage, and he then wrote the screen adaptation. Toland was not available, so Stanley Cortez was named cinematographer. The meticulous Cortez, however, was slow and the film lagged behind schedule and over budget. Prior to production, Welles's contract was renegotiated, revoking his right to control the final cut.

At RKO's request, simultaneously, Welles worked on an adaptation of Eric Ambler's spy thriller, Journey into Fear, which he co-wrote with Joseph Cotten. In addition to acting in the film, Welles was also producer. Direction was credited solely to Norman Foster. Welles later stated that they were in such a rush that the director of each scene was determined by whoever was closest to the camera.

CBS then offered Welles a new radio series called The Orson Welles Show. It was a half-hour variety show of short stories, comedy skits, poetry, and musical numbers. Joining the original Mercury Theatre cast for the show, was Cliff Edwards, the voice of Jiminy Cricket, "on loan from Walt Disney". The variety format was unpopular with listeners and Welles soon was forced to limit the content of the show simply to telling a one half-hour story for the entirety of each episode.

It's All True

To further complicate matters during the production of Ambersons and Journey into Fear, Welles was approached by Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney to produce a documentary film about South America. This was at the behest of the federal government's Good Neighbor policy, a wartime propaganda effort designed to prevent Latin America from allying with the Axis powers. Welles saw his involvement as a form of national service, since his physical condition excused him from direct military service.

Expected to film the Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Welles rushed to finish the editing on Ambersons and his acting scenes in Journey into Fear. Ending his CBS radio show, he lashed together a rough cut of Ambersons with Robert Wise, who had edited Citizen Kane, and left for Brazil. Wise was to join him in Rio to complete the film, but never arrived. A provisional final cut arranged via phone call, telegram, and shortwave radio was previewed without Welles's approval in Pomona in a double bill, to a mostly negative audience response, particularly to the character of Aunt Fanny played by Agnes Moorehead. Whereas Schaefer argued that Welles be allowed to complete his own version of the film, and that an archival copy be kept with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, RKO disagreed. With Welles in South America, there was no practical means of having him edit the film.

As a result of the difficult financial circumstances that RKO found itself in across the period 1940–42, major changes occurred at the studio in 1942 Floyd Odlum took over control of RKO and began changing its direction. Rockefeller, the most significant backer of the Brazil project, left the RKO board of directors. Around the same time, the principal sponsor of Welles at RKO, studio president George Schaefer, resigned. The changes throughout RKO caused reevaluations of many projects. RKO took control of Ambersons, formed a committee, which was ordered to edit the film into what the studio considered a commercial format. They removed fifty minutes of Welles's footage, re-shot sequences, rearranged the scene order, and added a happy ending. Koerner released the shortened film on the bottom of a double-bill with the Lupe Vélez comedy, Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost. Ambersons was an expensive flop for RKO, although it received four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Agnes Moorehead.

Welles's South American documentary, entitled It's All True, budgeted at one million dollars with half of its budget coming from the U.S. Government upon completion, grew in ambition and budget while Welles was in South America. While the film originally was to be a documentary on Carnaval, Welles added a new story which recreated the journey of the jangadeiros, four poor fishermen who had made a journey on their open raft to petition Brazilian President Vargas about their working conditions. The four had become national folk heroes; Welles first read of their journey in TIME. Their leader, Jacare, died during a filming mishap. RKO, in limited contact with Welles, attempted to rein in the production. Most of the crew and budget were withdrawn from the film. In addition, the Mercury staff was removed from the studio in the U.S.

Welles requested resources to finish the film. He was given a limited amount of black-and-white stock and a silent camera. He completed the sequence, but RKO refused to support any further production on the film. Surviving footage was released in 1993, including a rough reconstruction of the "Four Men on a Raft" segment. Meanwhile, RKO asserted in public that Welles had gone to Brazil without a screenplay and that he had squandered a million dollars. Their official company slogan for the next year was, "Showmanship in place of Genius" – which was taken as a slight against Welles.

Director for hire (1943–1946)

On returning to Hollywood, Welles found no studios interested in hiring him as a film director after the twin disasters of The Magnificent Ambersons and It's All True. Welles next worked on radio. CBS offered him two weekly series, Hello Americans, based on the research he'd done in Brazil, and Ceiling Unlimited, sponsored by Lockheed, a wartime salute to advances in aviation. Both featured several members of his original Mercury Theatre troupe. Within a few months, Hello Americans was canceled and Welles was replaced as host of Ceiling Unlimited by Joseph Cotten. Welles guest-starred on a great variety of shows, notably guest-hosting Jack Benny shows for a month in 1943. He took an increasingly active role in American and international politics and used journalism to communicate his forceful ideas widely.

In 1943, Welles married Rita Hayworth. They had one child, Rebecca Welles, and divorced five years later in 1948. In between, Welles found work as an actor in other directors' films. He starred in the 1944 film adaptation of Jane Eyre, trading credit as associate producer for top billing over Joan Fontaine. He also had a cameo in the 1944 wartime salute Follow the Boys, in which he performed his Mercury Wonder Show magic act and "sawed" Marlene Dietrich in half after Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn refused to allow Hayworth to perform.

In 1944, Welles was offered a new radio show, broadcast only in California, Orson Welles' Almanac. It was another half-hour variety show, with Mobil Oil as sponsor. After the success of his stand-in hosting on The Jack Benny Show, the focus was primarily on comedy. His hosting on the Jack Benny show included several self-deprecating jokes and story lines about his being a "genius" and overriding any ideas advanced by other cast members. The trade papers were not eager to accept Welles as a comedian, and Welles often complained on-air about the poor quality of the scripts. When Welles started his Mercury Wonder Show a few months later, traveling to armed forces camps and performing magic tricks and doing comedy, the radio show was broadcast live from the camps and the material took on a decidedly wartime flavor. Of his original Mercury actors, only Agnes Moorehead remained working with him. The series was cancelled by year's end due to poor ratings.

While he found no studio willing to hire him as a film director, Welles's popularity as an actor continued. Pabst Blue Ribbon gave Welles their radio series This Is My Best to direct, but after one month he was fired for creative differences. He started writing a political column for the New York Post, again called Orson Welles's Almanac. While the paper wanted Welles to write about Hollywood gossip, Welles explored serious political issues. His activism for world peace took considerable amounts of his time. The Post column eventually failed in syndication because of contradictory expectations and was dropped by the Post.

Post-war work (1946–1948)

The Stranger

In 1946, International Pictures released Welles's film The Stranger, starring Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, and Welles. Sam Spiegel produced the film, which follows the hunt for a Nazi war criminal living under an alias in America. While Anthony Veiller was credited with the screenplay, it had been rewritten by Welles and John Huston. Disputes occurred during the editing process between Spiegel and Welles. The film became a box office success and it helped his standing with the studios.

In the summer of 1946, Welles directed a musical stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days, with a comedic and ironic rewriting of the Jules Verne novel by Welles, incidental music and songs by Cole Porter, and production by Mike Todd, who would later produce the successful film version with David Niven. When Todd pulled out from the lavish and expensive production, Welles alone supported the finances. When he ran out of money at one point, he convinced Columbia president Harry Cohn to send him enough to continue the show, and in exchange, Welles promised to write, produce, direct, and star in a film for Cohn for no further fee. The stage show soon failed, due to poor box-office, with Welles unable to claim the losses on his taxes. The complicated financial arrangements concerning the show, its losses, and Welles's arrangement with Cohn, resulted in a tax dispute with the IRS.

At the same time in 1946 he began two new radio series, The Mercury Summer Theatre for CBS and Orson Welles Commentaries for ABC. While Summer Theatre featured half-hour adaptations of some of the classic Mercury radio shows from the 1930s, the first episode was a condensation of his Around the World stage play, and remains the only record of Cole Porter's music for the project. Several original Mercury actors returned for the series, as well as Bernard Herrmann. It only was scheduled for the summer months, and Welles invested his earnings into his failing stage play. Commentaries was a political vehicle for him, continuing the themes from his New York Post column. Again, Welles lacked a clear focus, until the NAACP brought to his attention the case of Isaac Woodard. Welles brought significant attention to Woodard's cause. Soon Welles was being hanged in effigy in the South and theaters refused to show The Stranger in several southern states.

The Lady from Shanghai

The film Welles was obliged to make for Cohn helping him complete Around the World in Eighty Days ended up being The Lady from Shanghai, filmed in 1947 for Columbia Pictures. Intended to be a modest thriller, the budget skyrocketed after Cohn suggested that Welles's then-estranged second wife Rita Hayworth co-star. Cohn disliked Welles's rough-cut, particularly the confusing plot and lack of close-ups, and was not in sympathy with Welles's Brechtian use of irony and black comedy, especially in a farcical courtroom scene. Cohn ordered extensive editing and re-shoots. After heavy editing by the studio, approximately one hour of Welles's first cut had been removed, including much of a climactic confrontation scene in an amusement park funhouse. While expressing displeasure at the cuts, Welles was appalled particularly at the musical score. The film was considered a disaster in America at the time of release, though the closing shootout in a hall of mirrors has since become one of the touchstones of film noir. Not long after release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce. Although The Lady From Shanghai was acclaimed in Europe, it was not embraced in the U.S. for several decades. Influential modern critics including David Kehr have subsequently declared it a masterpiece, with Kehr calling it "the weirdest great movie ever made." A similar situation occurred when Welles suggested to Charlie Chaplin that he star in a film directed by Welles based on the life of the French serial killer, Henri Désiré Landru. Instead, Chaplin adapted the idea for his own film, Monsieur Verdoux, with Welles officially credited for the idea.

Macbeth

In 1948, Welles convinced Republic Pictures to let him direct a low-budget version of Macbeth, which featured extremely stylized sets and costumes, and a cast of actors lip-syncing to a prerecorded soundtrack, one of many innovative cost-cutting techniques Welles deployed in an attempt to make an epic film from B-movie resources. The script, adapted by Welles, is a violent reworking of the Shakespearean original, freely cutting and pasting lines into new contexts via a collage technique, and recasting Macbeth as a clash of pagan and proto-Christian ideologies. Some of the voodoo trappings of the famous Welles/Houseman Negro Theatre stage adaptation are also visible, especially in the film's characterization of the Weird Sisters, who create an effigy of Macbeth as a charm to enchant him. Of all Welles's post-Kane Hollywood productions, Macbeth is closest to Citizen Kane in its use of long takes and deep focus photography. Shots of the increasingly isolated Scottish king looming in the foreground while other characters address him from deep in the background overtly reference Kane.

Republic initially trumpeted the film as an important work but decided it did not care for the Scottish accents on the soundtrack and held up general release for almost a year after early negative press reaction, which included Life's comment that Welles's film "doth foully slaughter Shakespeare." Welles left for Europe, while his co-producer and life-long supporter Richard Wilson reworked the soundtrack. Welles ultimately returned and cut twenty minutes from the film at Republic's request and recorded narration to cover the gaps. The film was decried as another disaster. Macbeth had its share of influential fans in Europe, especially the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who hailed the film's "crude, irreverent power" and careful shot design, and described the characters as haunting "the corridors of some dreamlike subway, an abandoned coal mine, and ruined cellars oozing with water." In the late 1970s, a fully restored version of Macbeth was released that followed Welles's original vision, and all prints of the truncated continuity have gradually been withdrawn from circulation, turning Welles's compulsory recut, which has the distinction of being created by the director himself, into something of a lost work.

Welles in Europe (1948–1956)

Welles left Hollywood for Europe in late 1947, enigmatically saying that he had chosen "freedom." In Italy he starred as Cagliostro in the 1948 film Black Magic. His co-star, Akim Tamiroff, impressed Welles so much that Tamiroff would appear in four of Welles's own productions during the 1950s and 1960s.

The Third Man

The following year, Welles starred as Harry Lime in Carol Reed's The Third Man, alongside Joseph Cotten, his good friend and co-star from Citizen Kane, with a script by Graham Greene and a memorable zither score by Anton Karas. The film was an international smash hit, but unfortunately Welles had turned down a percentage of the gross in exchange for a lump-sum advance. A few years later British radio producer Harry Alan Towers would resurrect the Lime character for radio in the series The Lives of Harry Lime. The 1951 series included new recordings by Karas, was very successful, and ran for 52 weeks. Welles claimed to write a handful of episodes—a claim disputed by Towers, who maintains they were written by Ernest Borneman—which later would serve as the basis for the screenplay by Welles, Mr. Arkadin (1955).

Welles also appeared as Cesare Borgia in the 1949 Italian film Prince of Foxes, with Tyrone Power and Mercury Theatre alumnus Everett Sloane, and as the Mongol warrior Bayan in the 1950 film version of the novel The Black Rose (again with Tyrone Power).

Othello

During this time, Welles was channeling his money from acting jobs into a self-financed film version of Shakespeare's play Othello. From 1949 to 1951, Welles worked on Othello, filming on location in Europe and Morocco. The film featured Welles's old friends, Micheál Mac Liammóir as Iago and Hilton Edwards as Desdemona's father Brabantio. Suzanne Cloutier starred as Desdemona and Campbell Playhouse alumnus Robert Coote appeared as Iago's associate Roderigo.

in the 1952 film Othello.]]

Filming was suspended several times as Welles ran out of funds and left to find other acting jobs, accounted in detail in MacLiammóir's published memoir Put Money in Thy Purse. When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival it won the Palme d'Or, but was not given a general release in the United States until 1955 (by which time Welles had re-cut the first reel and re-dubbed most of the film, removing Cloutier's voice entirely), and it played only in New York and Los Angeles. The American release prints had a technically flawed soundtrack, suffering from a complete drop-out of sound at every quiet moment. It was one of these flawed prints that was restored by Welles's daughter, Beatrice Welles-Smith in 1992 for a wide re-release. The restoration included reconstructing Angelo Francesco Lavagnino's original musical score (which was inaudible) and adding ambient stereo sound effects (which weren't in the original film). The subject of great controversy among film scholars, the restoration went on to a successful theatrical run in America. A print of the U.S. version was released on laser-disc in 1995 and soon withdrawn after a legal challenge by Beatrice Welles-Smith. The original Cannes version has survived, but is not available commercially.

In 1952 Welles continued finding work in England, after the success of the Harry Lime radio show. Harry Alan Towers offered Welles another series, The Black Museum, with Welles as host and narrator, and this would also run 52 weeks. Director Herbert Wilcox offered him the part of the murdered victim in Trent's Last Case, based on the novel by E. C. Bentley. In 1953 the BBC hired Welles to read an hour of selections from Walt Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself. Towers hired Welles again, to play Professor Moriarty in the radio series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson.

Late in 1953, Welles returned to America to star in a live CBS Omnibus television presentation of Shakespeare's King Lear. The cast included MacLiammóir and the British actor, Alan Badel. While Welles received good notices, he was guarded by IRS agents, prohibited to leave his hotel room when not at the studio, prevented from making any purchases, and the entire sum (less expenses) he earned went to his tax bill. Welles returned to England after the broadcast.

In 1954, director George More O'Ferrall offered Welles the title role in the 'Lord Mountdrago' segment of Three Cases of Murder, co-starring Badel. Herbert Wilcox cast him as the antagonist in Trouble in the Glen opposite Margaret Lockwood, Forrest Tucker, and Victor McLaglen. Old friend John Huston cast him as Father Mapple in his 1956 film adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, starring Gregory Peck.

Mr. Arkadin

Welles's next turn as director was the film Mr. Arkadin (1955), which was produced by his political mentor from the 1940s, Louis Dolivet. It was filmed in France, Germany, Spain and Italy on a very limited budget. Based loosely on several episodes of the Harry Lime radio show, it stars Welles as a billionaire who hires a man to delve into the secrets of his past. The film stars Robert Arden, who had worked on the Harry Lime series; Welles's third wife, Paola Mori, whose voice was dubbed by actress Billie Whitelaw; and guest stars Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, Katina Paxinou and Mischa Auer. Frustrated by his slow progress in the editing room, producer Dolivet removed Welles from the project and finished the film without him. Eventually five different versions of the film would be released, two in Spanish and three in English. The version that Dolivet completed was retitled Confidential Report. In 2005 Stefan Droessler of the Munich Filmmuseum oversaw a reconstruction of the surviving film elements. Included in a DVD box set (The Complete Mr. Arkadin) released by The Criterion Collection, it is considered by Welles scholar and director Peter Bogdanovich to be the best version of Welles's original intentions for the film.

In 1955 Welles also directed two television series for the BBC. The first was The Orson Welles Sketchbook, a series of six 15-minute shows featuring Welles drawing in a sketchbook to illustrate his reminiscences for the camera (including such topics as the filming of It's All True and the Isaac Woodard case), and the second was Around the World with Orson Welles, a series of six travelogues set in different locations around Europe (such as Venice, the Basque Country between France and Spain, and England). Welles served as host and interviewer, his commentary including documentary facts and his own personal observations (a technique he would continue to explore). A seventh episode of this series, based on the Gaston Dominici case, was suppressed at the time by the French government, but was reconstructed after Welles's death and released to video in 1999.

In 1956 Welles completed Portrait of Gina, posthumously aired on German television under the title Viva Italia, a 30-minute personal essay on Gina Lollobrigida and the general subject of Italian sex symbols. Dissatisfied with the results—Welles recalled he had worked on it a lot and the result looked like it—he left the only print behind at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The film cans would remain in a lost-and-found locker at the hotel for several decades, where they were discovered after Welles's death.

Return to Hollywood (1956–1959)

In 1956, Welles returned to Hollywood, guesting on radio shows (notably as narrator of Tomorrow, a nuclear holocaust drama produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration). He guest starred on television shows, including I Love Lucy, and began filming a projected pilot for Desilu, owned by Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz, who had recently purchased the former RKO studios. The film was The Fountain of Youth, based on a story by John Collier. Originally deemed not viable as a pilot, the film wasn't aired until 1958. It won the Peabody Award for excellence. Welles's next feature film role was in Man in the Shadow for Universal Pictures in 1957, starring Jeff Chandler. Around this time period, however, Welles began to suffer from weight problems that would eventually cause a deterioration in his health.

Touch of Evil

Welles stayed on at Universal to direct (and co-star with) Charlton Heston in the 1958 film Touch of Evil, based on Whit Masterson's novel Badge of Evil (Welles, who wrote the screenplay for the film, claimed never to have read the book). Originally only hired as an actor, Welles was promoted to director by Universal Studios at the insistence of Charlton Heston. Reuniting many actors and technicians with whom he'd worked in Hollywood in the 1940s (including cameraman Russell Metty (The Stranger), make-up artist Maurice Siederman (Citizen Kane), and actors Joseph Cotten, Marlene Dietrich, and Akim Tamiroff), filming proceeded smoothly, with Welles finishing on schedule and on budget, and the studio bosses praising the daily rushes. After the end of production, the studio re-edited the film, re-shot scenes, and shot new exposition scenes to clarify the plot. Welles wrote a 58-page memo outlining suggestions and objections. The studio followed a few of the ideas, but cut another 30 minutes from the film and released it. The film was widely praised across Europe, awarded the top prize at the Brussels World's Fair.

In 1978, the long preview version of the film was rediscovered and released. In 1998, editor Walter Murch and producer Rick Schmidlin, consulting the original memo, used a workprint version to attempt to create a version of the film as close as possible to that outlined in the memo. This is at best a compromise that should not be mistaken for Welles's original intent. Welles stated in that memo that the film was no longer his version—it was the studio's, but as such, he was still prepared to help them with it.

As Universal reworked Touch of Evil, Welles began filming his adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote in Mexico, starring Mischa Auer as Quixote and Akim Tamiroff as Sancho Panza. While filming would continue in fits and starts for several years, Welles would never complete the project.

Welles continued acting, notably in The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and Compulsion (1959), but soon returned to Europe.

Return to Europe (1959–1970)

He continued shooting Don Quixote in Spain, but replaced Mischa Auer with Francisco Reiguera, and resumed acting jobs. In Italy in 1959, Welles directed his own scenes as King Saul in Richard Pottier's film David and Goliath. In Hong Kong he co-starred with Curt Jürgens in Lewis Gilbert's film Ferry to Hong Kong. In 1960, in Paris he co-starred in Richard Fleischer's film Crack in the Mirror. In Yugoslavia he starred in Richard Thorpe's film The Tartars.

By this time he had ceased filming Quixote. Though he would continue toying with the editing well into the 1970s, he never completed the film. As the process went on, Welles gradually voiced all of the characters himself and provided narration. In 1992, the director Jesús Franco constructed a film out of the portions of Quixote left behind by Welles. Some of the film stock had decayed badly. While the Welles footage was greeted with interest, the post-production by Franco was met with harsh criticism.

In 1961 Welles directed In the Land of Don Quixote, a series of eight half-hour episodes for the Italian television network RAI. Similar to the Around the World with Orson Welles series, they presented travelogues of Spain and included Welles's wife, Paola, and their daughter, Beatrice. Though Welles was fluent in Italian, the network was not interested in him providing Italian narration because of his accent, and the series sat unreleased until 1964, by which time the network had added Italian narration of its own. Ultimately, versions of the episodes were released with the original musical score Welles had approved, but without the narration.

The Trial

In 1962 Welles directed his adaptation of The Trial, based on the novel by Franz Kafka and produced by Alexander Salkind and Michael Salkind. The cast included Anthony Perkins as Josef K, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Paola Mori and Akim Tamiroff. While filming exteriors in Zagreb, Welles was informed that the Salkinds had run out of money, meaning that there could be no set construction. No stranger to shooting on found locations, Welles soon filmed the interiors in the Gare d'Orsay, at that time an abandoned railway station in Paris. Welles thought the location possessed a "Jules Verne modernism" and a melancholy sense of "waiting", both suitable for Kafka. The film failed at the box-office. Peter Bogdanovich would later observe that Welles found the film riotously funny. During the filming, Welles met Oja Kodar, who would later become his muse, star and mistress for the last twenty years of his life. Welles also stated in an interview with the BBC that it was his best film.

Welles played a film director in La Ricotta (1963)—Pier Paolo Pasolini's segment of the Ro.Go.Pa.G. movie, although his renowned voice was dubbed by Italian writer Giorgio Bassani. He continued taking what work he could find acting, narrating or hosting other people's work, and began filming Chimes at Midnight, which was completed in 1966. Filmed in Spain, it was a condensation of five Shakespeare plays, telling the story of Falstaff and his relationship with Prince Hal. The cast included Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Jeanne Moreau, Fernando Rey and Margaret Rutherford, with narration by Ralph Richardson. Music was again by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. Jess Franco served as second unit director.

Chimes at Midnight

Chimes at Midnight was based on Welles's play Five Kings which condensed five of Shakespeare's plays into one show in order to focus on the story of Falstaff. Welles produced the show in New York in 1939 but the opening night, where part 1 was acted, was a disaster and part 2 was never put on. He revamped the show and revisited it in 1960 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. But again, it was not successful. However, this later production was used as the base for the movie. The script contained text from five plays: primarily Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2, but also Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Keith Baxter played Prince Hal, and internationally respected Shakespearean interpreter, John Gielgud, played the King, Henry IV. The film's narration, spoken by Ralph Richardson, is taken from the chronicler Raphael Holinshed. According to Jeanne Moreau, Welles delayed filming for two weeks due to stage fright. Welles held this film in high regard and considered it, along with The Trial, his best work. As he remarked in 1982, "If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I'd offer up."

In 1966, Welles directed a film for French television, an adaptation of The Immortal Story, by Karen Blixen. Released in 1968, it stars Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio and Norman Eshley. The film had a successful run in French theaters. At this time Welles met Kodar again, and gave her a letter he had written to her and had been keeping for four years; they would not be parted again. They immediately began a collaboration both personal and professional. The first of these was an adaptation of Blixen's The Heroine, meant to be a companion piece to The Immortal Story and starring Kodar. Unfortunately, funding disappeared after one day's shooting. After completing this film, he appeared in a brief cameo as Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of A Man for All Seasons—a role for which he won considerable acclaim.

In 1967 Welles began directing The Deep, based on the novel Dead Calm by Charles Williams and filmed off the shore of Yugoslavia. The cast included Jeanne Moreau, Laurence Harvey and Kodar. Personally financed by Welles and Kodar, they could not obtain the funds to complete the project, and it was abandoned a few years later after the death of Harvey. The surviving footage was eventually edited and released by the Filmmuseum München. In 1968 Welles began filming a TV special for CBS under the title Orson's Bag, combining travelogue, comedy skits and a condensation of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice with Welles as Shylock. Funding for the show sent by CBS to Welles in Switzerland was seized by the IRS. Without funding, the show was not completed. The surviving film clips portions were eventually released by the Filmmuseum München.

In 1969, Welles authorized the use of his name for a cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Orson Welles Cinema remained in operation until 1986, with Welles making a personal appearance there in 1977. Also in 1969 he played a supporting role in John Huston's The Kremlin Letter. Drawn by the numerous offers he received to work in television and films, and upset by a tabloid scandal reporting his affair with Kodar, Welles abandoned the editing of Don Quixote and moved back to America in 1970.

Final years (1970–1985)

Welles returned to Hollywood, where he continued to self-finance his own film and television projects. While offers to act, narrate and host continued, Welles also found himself in great demand on talk shows, and made frequent appearances for Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson, Dean Martin, and Merv Griffin. Welles's primary focus in this period was filming The Other Side of the Wind, a project that took six years to film but has remained unfinished and unreleased. An early role was portraying Louis XVIII of France in Waterloo (1970). Welles also narrated the beginning and ending scenes of the Bud Yorkin historical comedy Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), which starred Gene Wilder, Donald Sutherland, and Hugh Griffith, among others. In 1971 Welles directed a short adaptation of Moby-Dick, a one-man performance on a bare stage, reminiscent of his stage production Moby Dick Rehearsed from the 1950s. Never completed, it was eventually released by the Filmmuseum München. He also appeared in La Décade prodigieuse, co-starring with Anthony Perkins and directed by Claude Chabrol, based on a detective novel by Ellery Queen. That same year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an honorary award "For superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures". Welles pretended to be out of town and sent John Huston to claim the award. Huston criticized the Academy for awarding Welles while they refused to give him any work.

In 1972, Welles acted as on-screen narrator for the film documentary version of Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock. Working again for a British producer, Welles played Long John Silver in director John Hough's Treasure Island (1972), an adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, which had been the second story broadcast by The Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938. Welles also contributed to the script, his writing credit was attributed to the pseudonym 'O. W. Jeeves'. Welles original recorded dialog was re dubbed by Robert Rietty.

In 1973, Welles completed F for Fake, a personal essay film about art forger Elmyr de Hory and the biographer Clifford Irving. Based on an existing documentary by François Reichenbach, it included new material with Oja Kodar, Joseph Cotten, Paul Stewart and William Alland. An excerpt of Welles's 1930s War of the Worlds broadcast was recreated for this film, however none of the dialogue heard in the film actually matches what was originally broadcast. Welles filmed a five minute trailer, rejected in the US, that featured several shots of a topless Kodar.

Welles hosted and narrated a syndicated anthology series, Orson Welles's Great Mysteries, over the 1973–1974 television season. It did not last beyond that season; however, the program could be perceived as a television revival of the Mercury Theatre whose executive producer Welles had been in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1975, Welles narrated the documentary Bugs Bunny: Superstar, focusing on Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1940s. Also in 1975, the American Film Institute presented Welles with its third Lifetime Achievement Award (the first two going to director John Ford and actor James Cagney). At the ceremony, Welles screened two scenes from the nearly finished The Other Side of the Wind. Filming had begun in 1972 and by 1976, Welles had almost completed the film. Financed by Iranian backers, ownership of the film fell into a legal quagmire after the Shah of Iran was deposed. Written by Welles, the story told of a destructive old film director looking for funds to complete his final film. It starred John Huston and the cast included Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, Norman Foster, Edmond O'Brien, Cameron Mitchell, and Dennis Hopper. While there have been several reports of all the legal disputes concerning ownership of the film being settled, enough disputes still exist to prevent its release. The Showtime cable network has promised support for the project should the various entanglements associated with it be resolved.

In 1976, Paramount Television purchased the rights for the entire set of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories for Orson Welles. Welles had once wanted to make a series of Nero Wolfe movies, but Rex Stout — who declined Hollywood adaptations during his lifetime after two disappointing 1930s films — turned him down. Paramount planned to begin with an ABC-TV movie and hoped to persuade Welles to continue the role in a mini-series. Frank D. Gilroy was signed to write the television script and direct the TV movie on the assurance that Welles would star, but by April 1977 Welles had bowed out. In 1980 the Associated Press reported "the distinct possibility" that Welles would star in a Nero Wolfe TV series for NBC television. Again, Welles bowed out of the project due to creative differences and William Conrad was cast in the role.

In 1979 Welles completed his documentary Filming Othello, which featured Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards. Made for West German television, it was also released in theaters. That same year, Welles completed his self-produced pilot for The Orson Welles Show television series, featuring interviews with Burt Reynolds, Jim Henson and Frank Oz and guest-starring The Muppets and Angie Dickinson. Unable to find network interest, the pilot was never broadcast. In 1979 Welles also appeared in the biopic The Secret of Nikola Tesla, and a cameo in The Muppet Movie as Lew Lord.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Welles participated in a series of famous television commercial advertisements. For two years he was on-camera spokesman for the Paul Masson Vineyards, and sales grew by one third during the time Welles intoned what became a popular catchphrase: "We will sell no wine before its time." He was also the voice behind the long-running Carlsberg "Probably the best lager in the world" campaign and promoted Domecq sherry on British television.

In 1981, Welles hosted the documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, about Renaissance-era prophet Nostradamus. In 1982 the BBC broadcast The Orson Welles Story in the Arena series. Interviewed by Leslie Megahey, Welles examined his past in great detail, and several people from his professional past were interviewed as well. It was reissued in 1990 as With Orson Welles: Stories of a Life in Film. Welles provided narration for the tracks "Defender" from Manowar's album Fighting the World and "Dark Avenger" on Manowar's 1982 album, Battle Hymns. His name was misspelled on the latter album, as he was credited as "Orson Wells".

During the 1980s, Welles worked on such film projects as The Dreamers, based on two stories by Isak Dinesen and starring Oja Kodar, and The Orson Welles Magic Show, which reused material from his failed TV pilot. Another project he worked on was Filming The Trial, the second in a proposed series of documentaries examining his feature films. While much was shot for these projects, none of them was completed. All of them were eventually released by the Filmmuseum München.

In 1984, Welles narrated the short-lived television series Scene of the Crime. During the early years of Magnum, P.I., Welles was the voice of the unseen character Robin Masters, a famous writer and playboy. Welles's death forced this minor character to largely be written out of the series. In an oblique homage to Welles, the Magnum, P.I. producers ambiguously concluded that story arc by having one character accuse another of having hired an actor to portray Robin Masters.

The last film roles before Welles's death included voice work in the animated films The Enchanted Journey (1984) and The Transformers: The Movie (1986), in which he played the planet-eating robot Unicron. His last film appearance was in Henry Jaglom's 1987 independent film Someone to Love, released after his death but produced before his voice-over in Transformers: The Movie. His last television appearance was on the television show Moonlighting. He recorded an introduction to an episode entitled "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice", which was partially filmed in black and white. The episode aired five days after his death and was dedicated to his memory.

Personal life

Relationships and family

In 1934, Welles eloped with Chicago-born actress and socialite Virginia Nicolson. They divorced in 1940 after Welles's affair with Vera Zorina was vaguely mentioned in Walter Winchell's column.

Since 1932, Welles had fallen in love with Mexican actress, Dolores del Río. They lived a torrid romance between 1938 and 1942, though he was ten years her junior. They collaborated together in the movie Journey into Fear but the affair ended soon afterward.

Welles married Rita Hayworth in 1943. The couple became estranged during the making of The Lady from Shanghai. After five years, Rita filed for divorce, her reason to the press being, "I can't take his genius any more." During his last interview and only two hours before his death, Welles answered Merv Griffin's suggestive comment "But one of your wives—oh, I have envied you so many years for Rita Hayworth", by calling her "one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived" and saying that he was "lucky enough to have been with her longer than any of the other men in her life."

In 1955 Welles married Italian actress Paola Mori (Countess Paola Di Girifalco). Estranged for decades, the couple were never divorced. Croatian-born actress Oja Kodar became Welles's longtime companion both personally and professionally from 1966 on. They lived together for the last twenty-four years of his life. A year after Orson's death, Paola and Oja finally agreed on the settling of his will. On the way to their meeting to sign the papers, however, Paola was killed in a car accident.

Welles had three children: author Christopher Welles, or Chris Welles Feder (born in 1938, with Virginia Nicolson), Rebecca Welles Manning (born December 17, 1944 – died October 14, 2004, with Rita Hayworth) and Beatrice Welles (born in 1955, with Paola Mori).

Some of Welles's claimed familial ties have not held up under scrutiny. Despite the persistent urban legend, promoted by Welles himself, he was not the great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln's wartime Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles. Perhaps the genesis of the myth dates to a 1970 interview on The Dick Cavett Show during which Welles remarks about his venerable great-grandfather Gideon Welles. Orson Welles's father was Richard Head Welles, son of his paternal grandfather Richard Jones Welles; Gideon Welles had no son by that name. His sons were Hubert (1833–1862), John Arthur (1845–1883), Thomas G. (1846–1892), and Edgar Thaddeus Welles (1843–1914).

Physical characteristics

According to a 1941 physical exam taken when he was 26, Welles was tall and weighed . His eyes were brown. Other sources cite that he was tall, but the slates from costume tests made during the 1940s show him as . Welles gained a significant amount of weight in his 40s, eventually rendering him morbidly obese, at one point weighing nearly four hundred pounds (181.4 kg). His obesity was severe to the point that it restricted his ability to travel, aggravated other health conditions, including his asthma, and even required him to go on a diet in order to play the famously portly Sir John Falstaff. Some have attributed his over-eating and drinking to depression over his marginalization by the Hollywood system.

Religious beliefs

In April 1982, Merv Griffin interviewed Welles and asked about his religious beliefs. Welles replied, "I try to be a Christian, I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God." After the success of his 1941 film Citizen Kane, Welles announced that his next film would be about the life of Jesus, and that he would play the lead role. However, Welles never got around to making the film. He narrated the Christian documentary The Late, Great Planet Earth as well as the 1961 Biblical film about the life of Christ, King of Kings.

Politics

Welles was politically active from the beginning of his career. He remained a man of the left throughout his life, and always defined his political orientation as "progressive". He was a strong supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and often spoke out on radio in support of progressive politics. In particular, he was an early and outspoken critic of American racism and the practice of segregation. He campaigned heavily for Roosevelt in the 1944 election. For several years, he wrote a newspaper column on political issues and briefly toyed with running for office. In 1970, Welles narrated (but did not write) a satirical political record on the administration of President Richard Nixon entitled The Begatting of the President.

In the 2006 book, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, writer Joseph McBride made several controversial claims about Welles. Though Welles said otherwise during his lifetime, McBride claimed Welles left America in the late 1940s to escape McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. McBride also claimed, in spite of the sexual content of Welles's contemporary work (F for Fake and the unfinished Other Side of the Wind), that Welles was extremely puritanical about sex based on his comment to Peter Bogdanovich that The Last Picture Show was "a dirty movie".

Welles once told Cahiers du cinéma about sex in film, "In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God."

Death

On October 10, 1985, Welles did his final interview on The Merv Griffin Show. He died two hours later of a heart attack at his home in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California, the same day as his Battle of Neretva co-star Yul Brynner. Welles's ashes were buried on the property of a long time friend, retired bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez, in Ronda, Spain.

Unfinished projects

Welles's reliance on self-production meant that many of his later projects were filmed piecemeal or were not completed. Welles financed his later projects through his own fundraising activities. He often also took on other work to obtain money to fund his own films.

Don Quixote

In the mid-1950s, Welles began work on Don Quixote, initially a commission from CBS television. Welles expanded the film to feature length, developing the screenplay to take Quixote and Sancho Panza into the modern age. Filming stopped with the death of Francisco Reiguera, the actor playing Quixote, in 1969. Orson Welles continued editing the film into the early 1970s. At the time of his death, the film remained largely a collection of footage in various states of editing. The project and more importantly Welles's conception of the project changed radically over time. A version of the film was created from available fragments in 1992 and released to a very negative reception.

The Merchant of Venice

In 1969 Welles was given another TV commission to film a condensed adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. Although Welles had actually completed the film by 1970 the finished negative was later mysteriously stolen from his Rome production office.

The Other Side of the Wind

In 1970 Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind. The film relates the efforts of a film director (played by John Huston) to complete his last Hollywood picture and is largely set at a lavish party. By 1972 the filming was reported by Welles as being "96% complete", though it is likely that Welles had only edited about 40 minutes of the film by 1979. In that year, legal complications over the ownership of the film forced the negative into a Paris vault where it remained until 2004, when Peter Bogdanovich (who also acted in the film) announced his intention to complete the production. As of 2009, legal complications over the Welles estate have kept the film from being finished or released. Some footage is included in the documentary Working with Orson Welles (1993).

Other unfinished projects

Heart of Darkness: Welles's projected first film in 1940, planned in extreme detail and with some test shots filmed. (The footage is now lost.) It was planned to be entirely shot in long takes from the point of view of the narrator, Marlow, who would be played by Welles, seeing his own reflection in the window as his boat sailed down river. The project was abandoned because it could not be delivered on budget, and Citizen Kane was made instead. Mr. American: Early 1940 drafts of Citizen Kane were based far more overtly on the life of Howard Hughes than on William Randolph Hearst, and would have made for a substantially different picture.

It's All True: Welles did not originally want to direct this 1942 documentary on South America, but after its abandonment by RKO, he spent much of the 1940s attempting to buy the negative of his material from RKO, so that he could edit and release it in some form. The footage remained unseen in vaults for decades, and was assumed lost. Over 50 years later, some (but not all) of the surviving material saw release in the 1993 documentary It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles.

Monsieur Verdoux: In 1944, Welles wrote the first-draft script of this film, which he also intended to direct. Charlie Chaplin initially agreed to star in it, but later changed his mind, citing never having been directed by someone else in a feature before. Chaplin bought the film rights and made the film himself in 1947, with some changes (Welles said the gallows scenes were written by Chaplin, but that much of the film was unchanged from his own script). The final film credits Chaplin with the script, "based on an idea by Orson Welles".

Cyrano de Bergerac: Welles spent around nine months c. 1947-8 co-writing the screenplay for this along with Ben Hecht, a project Welles was assigned to direct for Alexander Korda. He began scouting for locations in Europe whilst filming Black Magic, but Korda was short of money, so sold the rights to Columbia pictures, who eventually dismissed Welles from the project, and then sold the rights on to United Artists, who in turn made a film version in 1950, which was not based on Welles's script. Around the World in 80 Days: After Welles's elaborate musical stageshow of this Jules Verne novel, encompassing 38 different sets, he began shooting some test footage in Morocco for a film version in 1947. The footage was never edited, funding never came through, and Welles abandoned the project. Nine years later, the stage show's producer Mike Todd made his own award-winning film version of the book. Moby Dick Rehearsed: a film version of Welles's 1955 London meta-play, starring Gordon Jackson, Christopher Lee, Patrick McGoohan, and with Welles as Ahab. Using bare, minimalist sets, Welles alternated between a cast of nineteenth-century actors rehearsing a production of Moby Dick, with scenes from Moby Dick itself. Kenneth Williams, a cast member who was apprehensive about the entire project, recorded in his autobiography that Welles's dim, atmospheric stage lighting made some of the footage so dark as to be unwatchable. The entire play was filmed, but is now presumed lost. The recording was made during one weekend at the Hackney Empire theatre. Histoires extraordinaires: The producers of this 1968 anthology film, based on short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, announced in June 1967 that Welles would direct one segment based on both "Masque of the Red Death" and "The Cask of Amontillado" for the omnibus film. Welles withdrew in September 1967 and was replaced. The script, written in English by Welles and Oja Kodar, is in the Filmmuseum Munchen collection. One-Man Band: This Monty Python-esque spoof in which Welles plays all but one of the characters (including two characters in drag), was made around 1968-9. Welles intended this completed sketch to be one of several items in a television special on London. Other items filmed for this special – all included in the "One Man Band" documentary by his partner Oja Kodar – comprised a sketch on Winston Churchill (played in silhouette by Welles), a sketch on peers in a stately home, a feature on London gentlemen's clubs, and a sketch featuring Welles being mocked by his snide Savile Row tailor (played by Charles Gray).

Treasure Island: Welles wrote two screenplays for this in the 1960s, and was eager to seek financial backing to direct it. Eventually, his own screenplay (under the pseudonym of O.W. Jeeves) was further rewritten, and formed the basis of the 1972 film version directed by John Hough, in which Welles played Long John Silver.

The Deep: An adaptation of Charles Williams' Dead Calm. The picture was entirely set on two boats and shot mostly in close-ups, and was filmed off the coasts of Yugoslavia and the Bahamas, between 1966 and 1969, with all but one scene completed. Originally planned as commercially viable thriller, to show that Welles could make a popular, successful film. It was put on hold in 1970 when Welles worried that critics would not respond favourably to this film as his theatrical follow-up to the much-lauded Chimes at Midnight, and Welles focused instead on F for Fake. It was abandoned altogether in 1973 due to the death of its star Laurence Harvey. The Munich Film Museum holds a restored copy, with title cards filling out the missing scene. Saint Jack. In 1978 Welles was lined up by his long-time protégé Peter Bogdanovich (who was then acting as Welles's de facto agent) to direct this adaptation of the 1973 Paul Theroux novel about an American pimp in Singapore. Hugh Hefner and Bogdnovich's then-partner Cybill Shepherd were both attached to the project as producers, with Hefner providing finance through his Playboy productions. However, both Hefner and Shepherd became convinced that Bogdanovich himself would be a more commercially viable director than Welles, and insisted that Bogdanovich take over. Since Bogdanovich was also in need of work after a series of box office flops, he agreed. When the film was finally made in 1979 by Bogdanovich and Hefner (but without Welles or Shepherd's participation), Welles felt betrayed and according to Bogdanovich the two "drifted apart a bit". Filming The Trial: After the success of his 1978 film Filming Othello made for West German television, and mostly consisting of a monologue to the camera, Welles began shooting scenes for this follow-up film, but never completed it. What Welles did film was an 80 minute question-and-answer session in 1981 with film students asking about the film. The footage was kept by Welles's cinematographer Gary Graver, who donated it to the Munich Film Museum, which then pieced it together with Welles's trailer for the film, into an 83 minute film which is occasionally screened at film festivals.

The Big Brass Ring: A script of this project was eventually adapted and filmed by George Hickenlooper in 1999 as a play-within-a-film, about Orson Welles's production of the play. Welles's complete screenplay was one of his last projects, written in 1985.

King Lear: At the time of his death, Welles was in talks with a French production company to direct a film version of the Shakespeare play, in which he would also play the title role.

An adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada for which Welles flew to Paris to discuss the project personally with the Russian author.

Legacy

The 1996 documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane chronicles the battle between Welles and Hearst. A 1999 HBO docudrama, RKO 281, tells the story of the making of Citizen Kane, starring Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles.

Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock chronicles the process and events surrounding Welles and John Houseman's production of the 1937 musical by Marc Blitzstein. In it, Welles is played by actor Angus MacFadyen.

Playwright and actor Austin Pendleton wrote the play Orson's Shadow about Welles and his collaboration with Laurence Olivier. It deals with the time that Welles directed Laurence Olivier in a production of Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros. According to this play, Welles privately disliked Olivier's film adaptations of Shakespeare's works (which were far more successful than Welles's), at one point stating that Olivier's film of Hamlet "looked like a Joan Crawford movie". Welles struggled with getting Olivier to play not merely someone lower-class (as he did in The Entertainer) but getting Olivier to play someone utterly non-descript.

Author Kim Newman has featured Orson Welles as a character in several stories from his Anno Dracula series.

In the Tim Burton-directed biopic Ed Wood (1994), Welles (played by Vincent D'Onofrio and dubbed by Maurice LaMarche) makes a brief "cameo appearance", giving advice to director Edward D. Wood, Jr. who idolises Welles. Inspired, Wood proceeds to finish his film Plan 9 from Outer Space, sometimes called one of the worst films of all time. Though Ed Wood is based on Wood's life, in reality the scene is entirely fictional: Wood never met Orson Welles. D'Onofrio would again portray Welles in the 2005 30-minute film Five Minutes Mr. Welles concerning Welles's role in the film The Third Man.

Although the character Brain from the animated series Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain was not initially modeled after Welles, Maurice LaMarche was shown a picture of Brain and tasked with finding a voice for the character. LaMarche immediately thought of Welles and decided to do his Welles impersonation. LaMarche also played Welles in The Critic (where his "later work", ads for such products as 'Mrs. Pell's Fishsticks', is referenced) and in the Futurama episode "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences", in which he performs a WOTW-like play.

One of the recurring celebrity characters on the influential Canadian sketch comedy TV show Second City Television (SCTV) was John Candy's impersonation of Welles. ON SCTV, Candy-as-Welles appeared in an embarrassing array of commercials, talk shows, and other low-budget productions. It's unknown whether or not Welles ever saw Candy's impersonation.

Me and Orson Welles, released in November 2009, stars Zac Efron as a teenager who convinces Welles (Christian McKay) to cast him in Welles's 1937 production of Julius Caesar, based on Robert Kaplow's novel.

The final segment of The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XVII" features a parody of Welles's 1938 War Of The Worlds radio broadcast in which, having been fooled once, the people of Springfield refuse to believe that an actual alien invasion is taking place. Welles was again voiced by Maurice LaMarche in the episode.

Filmography

Awards

The American Film Institute ranked Citizen Kane as the greatest American movie. These other Welles films were nominated for their list: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, director/producer/screenwriter); The Third Man (1949, actor); Touch of Evil (1958, actor/director/screenwriter); and A Man for All Seasons (1966, actor).

Citizen Kane was nominated for numerous prizes at the 1941 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role. The only Oscar won, however, was Best Original Screenplay, which Welles shared with Herman J. Mankiewicz. Welles later gave his statuette to cinematographer Gary Garver as payment for services rendered. Also, the film The Magnificent Ambersons was nominated for Best Picture, a year later.

The Stranger was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1947. Welles himself was awarded a Career Golden Lion in 1970.

In 1952, Welles's Othello won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Welles was nominated for Best Foreign Actor in a Leading Role at the 1968 BAFTA Awards for his performance in Chimes at Midnight.

Welles was given the first Career Golden Lion award in the Venice Film Festival in 1970.

In 1970, Welles won an Honorary Academy Award for "superlative and distinguished service in the making of motion pictures." In light of his poor treatment by the Academy and by the American film industry in general, Welles did not attend the ceremony. In 1970, he was awarded the French Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian decoration in France. Welles was also a distinguished Foreign Member of the Académie française, succeeded by Peter Ustinov.

Welles was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Film Institute in 1975.

In 1978, Welles was presented with the Los Angeles Film Critics Career Achievement Award.

n 1979, Welles was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.

In 1982, Welles was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture at the Golden Globe Awards for his role in Butterfly, and won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording for his role on Donovan's Brain.

Welles was awarded a Fellowship of the British Film Institute in 1983.

In 1984, Welles was given the D. W. Griffith Award of the Directors Guild of America.

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Welles as the 16th Greatest Male Star of All Time.

When asked to describe Welles's influence, Jean-Luc Godard remarked: "Everyone will always owe him everything." (Ciment, 42)

A highly divergent genus of Hawaiian spiders "Orsonwelles" is named in his honor (Hormiga et al. 2003)

He won three Grammy Awards, each win in the category of Best Spoken Word Recording: in 1976, for "Great American Documents" (shared with Helen Hayes, Henry Fonda and James Earl Jones; in 1978, for the original motion picture soundtrack to Citizen Kane; and in 1981, for a recording of Donovan's Brain.

In 2008 a statue of Welles sculpted by Oja Kodar was erected in the town of Split, Croatia.

References

Bibliography

Anderegg, Michael: Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Popular Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999

Bazin, Andre: Orson Welles, Harper and Row, 1978

Benamou, Catherine L.: It's All True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007

Beja, Morris, ed.: Perspectives on Orson Welles, G. K. Hall, 1995

Berg, Chuck and Erskine, Tom, ed.: The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles, Checkmark Books, 2003

Bessy, Maurice: Orson Welles: An investigation into his films and philosophy, Crown, 1971

Bogdanovich, Peter and Welles, Orson This Is Orson Welles, HarperPerennial 1992, ISBN 0-06-092439-X

Brady, Frank: Citizen Welles, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989

Callow, Simon: The Road to Xanadu. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

Callow, Simon: Hello Americans. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.

Carringer, Robert: The Making of Citizen Kane, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985

Carringer, Robert: The Magnificent Ambersons: a Reconstruction, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993

Ciment, Michel: "Les Enfants Terribles" in American Film, December 1984

Comito, Terry, ed.: Touch of Evil, Rutgers, 1985

Conrad, Peter: Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life, London: Faber and Faber, 2003

Cowie, Peter: The Cinema of Orson Welles, Da Capo Press, 1973.

D'Angela, Toni (ed.), Nelle terre di Orson Welles, Alessandria: Edizioni Falsopiano 2004.

Davies, Anthony: Filming Shakespeare's Plays, Cambridge University Press, 1988

Drazin, Charles: In Search of the Third Man, Limelight, 2000

Estrin, Mark: Orson Welles Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2002

Feder, Chris Welles: In My Father's Shadow: a Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009

France, Richard, ed.: Orson Welles on Shakespeare, London: Routledge, 2001

France, Richard: "The Theatre of Orson Welles", Bucknell University Press, 1977

Garis, Robert: "The Films of Orson Welles", Cambridge University Press, 2004

Gosling, John: "Waging the War of the Worlds", McFarland & Company, Inc, 2009

Gottesman, Ronald, ed.: Focus on Citizen Kane, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971

Gottesman, Ronald, ed.: Focus on Orson Welles, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976

Greene, Graham: The Third Man, London: Faber and Faber, 1991

Heyer, Paul: The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005

Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios, Chicago Review Press, 2005

Higham, Charles: The Films of Orson Welles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970

Higham, Charles: "Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius", New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985

Hormiga, G., M.A. Arnedo & R.G. Gillespie, 2003, "Speciation on a Conveyor Belt: Sequential Colonization of the Hawaiian Islands by "Orsonwelles" spiders (Araneae: Linyphiidae)., Syst. Biol. 52, 89–109.

Howard, James: "The Complete Films of Orson Welles", Citadel Press, 1991

Ishaghpour, Youssef: Orson Welles, cinéaste, une caméra visible, éditions de la différence, 2001

Jorgens, Jack J.: Shakespeare on Film, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977

Leaming, Barbara: Orson Welles, New York: Viking, 1985

Lyons, Bridget Gellert, ed.: Chimes at Midnight, Rutgers, 1988

Mac Liammóir, Micháel. Put Money in Thy Purse: The Filming of Orson Welles's Othello, Virgin, 1994

McBride, Joseph: Orson Welles, Harcourt Brace, 1977

McBride, Joseph: Orson Welles, Da Capo Press, 1996.

Mulvey, Laura: Citizen Kane, London: BFI, 1992

Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson Welles, Southern Methodist University Press, 1989.

Naremore, James, ed.: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane: a Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2004

Noble, Peter: The Fabulous Orson Welles, London: Hutchinson and Co., 1956

Perkins, V. F.: The Magnificent Ambersons, London: BFI, 1999

Rosenbaum, Jonathan: "Orson Welles's Essay Films and Documentary Fictions", in Placing Movies, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995

Rosenbaum, Jonathan: "The Battle Over Orson Welles", in Essential Cinema, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004

Rosenbaum, Jonathan: "Orson Welles as Ideological Challenge" in Movie Wars, A Capella Books, 2000

Rosenbaum, Jonathan: Discovering Orson Welles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007

Shakespeare Bulletin, Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 2005: Special Welles issue.

Simon, William G., ed.: "Special Welles issue", in: Persistence of Vision: the Journal of the Film Faculty of the City University of New York; Number 7, 1988

Simonson, Robert. "Orson's Shadow Talkback Series Continues May 4 with Welles's Daughter." May 3, 2005

Taylor, John Russell: Orson Welles: a Celebration, Pavilion, 1986

Taylor, John Russell: Orson Welles, Pavilion, 1998

Walsh, John Evangelist: Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst and Citizen Kane, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Walters, Ben: Welles, London: Haus Publishing, 2004 ISBN 978-1-904341-80-2

Welles, Orson: Les Bravades, Workman, 1996

Welles, Orson and Bogdanovich, Peter: This is Orson Welles, Da Capo Press, 1998.

Welles, Orson: Mr. Arkadin, London: HarperCollins, 2006

Welles, Orson: The Big Brass Ring, Black Spring Press, 1991

Welles, Orson: The Cradle Will Rock, Santa Teresa Press, 1994

Welles, Orson: "The Other Side of the Wind", in: Cahiers du cinéma/ Festival International du Film de Locarno, 2005

White, Rob: The Third Man, London: BFI, 2003

Wood, Bret: Orson Welles: a Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Blue, 1990

External links

Wellesnet

Special about Orson Welles, La furia umana, n°4, 2010, with pieces by James Naremore, Jonathan Rosenbaum,

Toni D'Angela, Richard Hell, Denis Lévy, Chris Fujiwara and others, lafuriaumana.it

Orson Welles – The One Man Band (1995)

Senses of Cinema Great Directors Critical Database: Orson Welles

Orson Welles bibliography

Orsonwelles.co.uk

Mercury Theatre on the Air

The Unseen Welles

Guide to the Orson Welles Materials: Lily Library, Indiana University

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Coordinates	23°31′58″N46°47′58″N
Honorific-prefix
Name	Sir Winston Churchill
Honorific-suffix
Order	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Term start	26 October 1951
Term end	7 April 1955
Monarch	George VIElizabeth II
Deputy	Anthony Eden
Predecessor	Clement Attlee
Successor	Anthony Eden
Term start2	10 May 1940
Term end2	26 July 1945
Deputy2	Clement Attlee
Monarch2	George VI
Predecessor2	Neville Chamberlain
Successor2	Clement Attlee
Order3	Chancellor of the Exchequer
Term start3	6 November 1924
Term end3	4 June 1929
Primeminister3	Stanley Baldwin
Predecessor3	Philip Snowden
Successor3	Philip Snowden
Order4	Home Secretary
Term start4	19 February 1910
Term end4	24 October 1911
Primeminister4	Herbert Henry Asquith
Predecessor4	Herbert Gladstone
Successor4	Reginald McKenna
Order5	Member of Parliamentfor Woodford
Term start5	5 July 1945
Term end5	15 October 1964
Predecessor5	New constituency
Successor5	Patrick Jenkin
Order6	Member of Parliamentfor Epping
Term start6	29 October 1924
Term end6	5 July 1945
Predecessor6	Sir Leonard Lyle
Successor6	Leah Manning
Order7	Member of Parliamentfor Dundee
Term start7	24 April 1908
Term end7	15 November 1922
Predecessor7	Alexander WilkieEdmund Robertson
Successor7	Edmund MorelEdwin Scrymgeour
Order8	Member of Parliamentfor Manchester North West
Term start8	8 February 1906
Term end8	24 April 1908
Predecessor8	William Houldsworth
Successor8	William Joynson-Hicks
Order9	Member of Parliamentfor Oldhamwith Alfred Emmott
Term start9	24 October 1900
Term end9	12 January 1906
Predecessor9	Walter RuncimanAlfred Emmott
Successor9	Alfred EmmottJohn Albert Bright
Birthname	Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
Birth date	November 30, 1874
Birth place	Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, OxfordshireEngland, United Kingdom
Death date	January 24, 1965
Death place	28 Hyde Park Gate, London, England
Restingplace	St Martin's Church, Bladon, Oxfordshire
Nationality	British
Party	Conservative (1900–04, 1924–64)Liberal (1904–24)
Spouse
Relations	Lord Randolph Churchill (father)Lady Randolph Churchill (mother)John Strange Spencer-Churchill (brother)Pamela Harriman (former daughter-in-law)Winston Churchill (grandson)
Children	Diana ChurchillRandolph ChurchillSarah Tuchet-JessonMarigold ChurchillMary Soames
Residence	10 Downing Street (Official)Chartwell (Private)28 Hyde Park Gate, London (Private, place of death)
Alma mater	Harrow School, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
Profession	Member of Parliament, statesman, soldier, journalist, historian, author, painter
Religion	Anglican
Allegiance	British Empire
Branch	British Army
Serviceyears	1895–1900, 1902–24
Rank	Lieutenant-Colonel
Awards
Battles	Anglo-Afghan War*Siege of MalakandMahdist War*Battle of OmdurmanSecond Boer War*Siege of LadysmithFirst World War*Western Front }}

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the great wartime leaders and served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. To date, he is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.

Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jenny Jerome, an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Sudan and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and through books he wrote about his campaigns.

At the forefront of politics for fifty years, he held many political and cabinet positions. Before the First World War, he served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty as part of the Asquith Liberal government. During the war, he continued as First Lord of the Admiralty until the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign, which he had sponsored, caused his departure from government. He then served briefly on the Western Front, commanding the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He returned to government as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, and Secretary of State for Air. After the War, Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative (Baldwin) government of 1924–29, controversially returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-War parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure on the UK economy. Also controversial were Churchill's opposition to increased home rule for India, and his resistance to the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII.

Out of office and politically "in the wilderness" during the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in warning about the danger from Hitler and in campaigning for rearmament. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain on 10 May 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister. His steadfast refusal to consider defeat, surrender or a compromise peace helped inspire British resistance, especially during the difficult early days of the War when Britain stood alone in its active opposition to Hitler. Churchill was particularly noted for his speeches and radio broadcasts, which helped inspire the British people. He led Britain as Prime Minister until victory had been secured over Nazi Germany.

After the Conservative Party lost the 1945 election, he became Leader of the Opposition. In 1951, he again became Prime Minister, before retiring in 1955. Upon his death, The Queen granted him the honour of a state funeral, which saw one of the largest assemblies of world statesmen ever. Churchill is widely regarded as among the most influential men in British history.

Family and early life

Born into the aristocratic Spencer family, Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, like his father, used the surname Churchill in public life. His ancestor George Spencer had changed his surname to Spencer-Churchill in 1817 when he became duke of Marlborough, to highlight his descent from John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Winston's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, was a politician; and his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill (née Jennie Jerome) was the daughter of American millionaire Leonard Jerome. Born on 30 November 1874, two months prematurely, in a bedroom in Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, Churchill had one brother, John Strange Spencer-Churchill.

Independent and rebellious by nature, Churchill generally did poorly in school, for which he was punished. He was educated at three independent schools: St. George's School, Ascot, Berkshire, followed by Brunswick School in Hove, near Brighton (the school has since been renamed Stoke Brunswick School and relocated to Ashurst Wood in West Sussex), and then at Harrow School from 17 April 1888, where his military career began. Within weeks of his arrival, he had joined the Harrow Rifle Corps. He earned high marks in English and History and was the school's fencing champion.

He was rarely visited by his mother (then known as Lady Randolph Churchill) and wrote letters begging her to either come to the school or to allow him to come home. His relationship with his father was a distant one; he once remarked that they barely spoke to each other. Because of the lack of parental contact, he became very close to his nanny, Elizabeth Anne Everest, whom he used to call "Old Woom". His father died on 24 January 1895, aged 45, leaving Churchill with the conviction that he too would die young and so should be quick about making his mark on the world.

Speech impediment

Various authors in the 1920s–1940s mentioned Churchill's stutter and Churchill described himself as having a "speech impediment", which he consistently worked to overcome. His dentures were specially designed to aid his speech (Demosthenes' pebbles). After many years, he could finally state, "My impediment is no hindrance".

The Churchill Centre, however, flatly denies the claim that Churchill stuttered, while confirming that he did have difficulty pronouncing the letter S and spoke with a lisp as did his father.

Marriage and children

Churchill met his future wife, Clementine Hozier, in 1904 at a ball in Crewe House, home of the Earl of Crewe and Crewe's wife Margaret Primrose (daughter of Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery). In 1908, they met again at a dinner party hosted by Lady St Helier. Churchill found himself seated beside Clementine, and they soon began a lifelong romance. He proposed to Clementine during a house party at Blenheim Palace on 10 August 1908, in a small Temple of Diana. On 12 September 1908, they were married in St. Margaret's, Westminster. The church was packed; the Bishop of St Asaph conducted the service. The couple spent their honeymoon at Highgrove House in Eastcote. In March 1909, the couple moved to a house at 33 Eccleston Square.

Their first child, Diana, was born in London on 11 July 1909. After the pregnancy, Clementine moved to Sussex to recover, while Diana stayed in London with her nanny. On 28 May 1911, their second child, Randolph, was born at 33 Eccleston Square. Their third child, Sarah, was born on 7 October 1914 at Admiralty House. The birth was marked with anxiety for Clementine, as Winston had been sent to Antwerp by the Cabinet to "stiffen the resistance of the beleaguered city" after news that the Belgians intended to surrender the town.

Clementine gave birth to her fourth child, Marigold Frances Churchill, on 15 November 1918, four days after the official end of the First World War. In the early days of August 1921, the Churchills' children were entrusted to a French nursery governess in Kent named Mlle Rose. Clementine, meanwhile, travelled to Eaton Hall to play tennis with Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster and his family. While still under the care of Mlle Rose, Marigold had a cold, but was reported to have recovered from the illness. As the illness progressed with hardly any notice, it turned into septicaemia. Following advice from a landlady, Rose sent for Clementine. However the illness turned fatal on 23 August 1921, and Marigold was buried in the Kensal Green Cemetery three days later.

On 15 September 1922, the Churchills' last child was born, Mary. Later that month, the Churchills bought Chartwell, which would be Winston's home until his death in 1965.

Military service

After Churchill left Harrow in 1893, he applied to attend the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. It took three attempts before he passed the entrance exam; he applied for cavalry rather than infantry because the grade requirement was lower and did not require him to learn mathematics, which he disliked. He graduated eighth out of a class of 150 in December 1894, and although he could now have transferred to an infantry regiment as his father had wished, chose to remain with the cavalry and was commissioned as a Cornet (Second Lieutenant) in the 4th Queen's Own Hussars on 20 February 1895. In 1941, he received the honour of being appointed Colonel of the Hussars.

Churchill's pay as a second lieutenant in the 4th Hussars was £300. However, he believed that he needed at least a further £500 (equivalent to £25,000 in 2001 terms) to support a style of life equal to other officers of the regiment. His mother provided an allowance of £400 per year, but this was repeatedly overspent. According to biographer Roy Jenkins, this is one reason he took an interest in war correspondence. He did not intend to follow a conventional career of promotion through army ranks, but to seek out all possible chances of military action and used his mother's and family influence in high society to arrange postings to active campaigns. His writings both brought him to the attention of the public, and earned him significant additional income. He acted as a war correspondent for several London newspapers and wrote his own books about the campaigns.

Cuba

In 1895, Churchill travelled to Cuba to observe the Spanish fight the Cuban guerrillas; he had obtained a commission to write about the conflict from the Daily Graphic. To his delight, he came under fire for the first time on his twenty-first birthday. He had fond memories of Cuba as a "...large, rich, beautiful island..." While there, he soon acquired a taste for Havana cigars, which he would smoke for the rest of his life. While in New York, he stayed at the home of Bourke Cockran, an admirer of his mother. Bourke was an established American politician, and a member of the House of Representatives. He greatly influenced Churchill, both in his approach to oratory and politics, and encouraging a love of America.

He soon received word that his nanny, Mrs Everest, was dying; he then returned to England and stayed with her for a week until she died. He wrote in his journal "She was my favourite friend." In My Early Life he wrote: "She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived."

India

In early October 1896, he was transferred to Bombay, British India. He was considered one of the best polo players in his regiment and led his team to many prestigious tournament victories.

In 1897, Churchill attempted to travel to both report and, if necessary, fight in the Greco-Turkish War, but this conflict effectively ended before he could arrive. Later, while preparing for a leave in England, he heard that three brigades of the British Army were going to fight against a Pashtun tribe in the North West Frontier of India and he asked his superior officer if he could join the fight. He fought under the command of General Jeffery, who was the commander of the second brigade operating in Malakand, in the Frontier region of British India. Jeffery sent him with fifteen scouts to explore the Mamund Valley; while on reconnaissance, they encountered an enemy tribe, dismounted from their horses and opened fire. After an hour of shooting, their reinforcements, the 35th Sikhs arrived, and the fire gradually ceased and the brigade and the Sikhs marched on. Hundreds of tribesmen then ambushed them and opened fire, forcing them to retreat. As they were retreating four men were carrying an injured officer but the fierceness of the fight forced them to leave him behind. The man who was left behind was slashed to death before Churchill's eyes; afterwards he wrote of the killer, "I forgot everything else at this moment except a desire to kill this man." However the Sikhs' numbers were being depleted so the next commanding officer told Churchill to get the rest of the men and boys to safety.

Before he left he asked for a note so he would not be charged with desertion. He received the note, quickly signed, and headed up the hill and alerted the other brigade, whereupon they then engaged the army. The fighting in the region dragged on for another two weeks before the dead could be recovered. He wrote in his journal: "Whether it was worth it I cannot tell." An account of the Siege of Malakand was published in December 1900 as The Story of the Malakand Field Force. He received £600 for his account. During the campaign, he also wrote articles for the newspapers The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph. His account of the battle was one of his first published stories, for which he received £5 per column from The Daily Telegraph.

Sudan and Oldham

Churchill was transferred to Egypt in 1898. He visited Luxor before joining an attachment of the 21st Lancers serving in the Sudan under the command of General Herbert Kitchener. During this time he encountered two military officers with whom he would work during the First World War: Douglas Haig, then a captain and David Beatty, then a gunboat lieutenant. While in the Sudan, he participated in what has been described as the last meaningful British cavalry charge, at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898. He also worked as a war correspondent for the Morning Post. By October 1898, he had returned to Britain and begun his two-volume work; The River War, an account of the reconquest of the Sudan which was published the following year. Churchill resigned from the British Army effective from 5 May 1899.

He soon had his first opportunity to begin a Parliamentary career, when he was invited by Robert Ascroft to be the second Conservative Party candidate in Ascroft's Oldham constituency. Ascroft's sudden death caused a double by-election and Churchill was one of the candidates. In the midst of a national trend against the Conservatives, both seats were lost; however Churchill impressed by his vigorous campaigning.

South Africa

Having failed at Oldham, Churchill looked about for some other opportunity to advance his career. On 12 October 1899, the Second Boer War between Britain and the Boer Republics broke out and he obtained a commission to act as war correspondent for the Morning Post with a salary of £250 per month. He rushed to sail on the same ship as the newly appointed British commander, Sir Redvers Buller. After some weeks in exposed areas he accompanied a scouting expedition in an armoured train, leading to his capture and imprisonment in a POW camp in Pretoria (converted school building for Pretoria High School for Girls). His actions during the ambush of the train led to speculation that he would be awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy, but this did not occur.

He escaped from the prison camp and travelled almost to Portuguese Lourenço Marques in Delagoa Bay, with the assistance of an English mine manager. His escape made him a minor national hero for a time in Britain, though instead of returning home, he rejoined General Buller's army on its march to relieve the British at the Siege of Ladysmith and take Pretoria. This time, although continuing as a war correspondent, he gained a commission in the South African Light Horse. He was among the first British troops into Ladysmith and Pretoria. He and his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, were able to get ahead of the rest of the troops in Pretoria, where they demanded and received the surrender of 52 Boer prison camp guards.

In 1900, Churchill returned to England on the RMS Dunottar Castle, the same ship on which he set sail for South Africa eight months earlier. He there published London to Ladysmith and a second volume of Boer war experiences, Ian Hamilton's March. Churchill stood again for parliament in Oldham in the general election of 1900 and won (his Conservative colleague, Crisp, was defeated) in the contest for two seats. After the 1900 general election he embarked on a speaking tour of Britain, followed by tours of the United States and Canada, earning in excess of £5,000.

Territorial service

In 1900, he retired from the regular army and in 1902 joined the Imperial Yeomanry where he was commissioned as a Captain in the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars on 4 January 1902. In April 1905, he was promoted to Major and appointed to command of the Henley Squadron of the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars. In September 1916, he transferred to the territorial reserves of officers where he remained till retiring in 1924, at the age of fifty.

Western front

Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty at the start of the First World War, but was obliged to leave the war cabinet after the disastrous Battle of Gallipoli. He attempted to obtain an appointment as a brigade commander, but settled for command of a battalion. After spending some time as a Major with the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, he was appointed Lieutenant-Colonel, commanding the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers (part of the 9th (Scottish) Division), on 1 January 1916. Correspondence with his wife shows that his intent in taking up active service was to rehabilitate his reputation, but this was balanced by the serious risk of being killed. As a commander he continued to exhibit the reckless daring which had been a hallmark of all his military actions, although he disapproved strongly of the mass slaughter involved in many western front actions.

Lord Deedes opined to a gathering of the Royal Historical Society in 2001 why Churchill went to the front line: "He was with Grenadier Guards, who were dry at battalion headquarters. They very much liked tea and condensed milk, which had no great appeal to Winston, but alcohol was permitted in the front line, in the trenches. So he suggested to the colonel that he really ought to see more of the war and get into the front line. This was highly commended by the colonel, who thought it was a very good thing to do."

Political career to the Second World War

Early years in Parliament

Churchill stood again for the seat of Oldham at the 1900 general election. After winning the seat, he went on a speaking tour throughout Britain and the United States, raising £10,000 for himself (about £}} today). In Parliament, he became associated with a faction of the Conservative Party led by Lord Hugh Cecil; the Hughligans. During his first parliamentary session, he opposed the government's military expenditure and Joseph Chamberlain's proposal of extensive tariffs, which were intended to protect Britain's economic dominance. His own constituency effectively deselected him, although he continued to sit for Oldham until the next general election. After the Whitsun recess in 1904 he crossed the floor to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. As a Liberal, he continued to campaign for free trade. When the Liberals took office with Henry Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister, in December 1905, Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies dealing mainly with South Africa after the Boer War. From 1903 until 1905, Churchill was also engaged in writing Lord Randolph Churchill, a two-volume biography of his father which was published in 1906 and received much critical acclaim.

Following his deselection in the seat of Oldham, Churchill was invited to stand for Manchester North West. He won the seat at the 1906 general election with a majority of 1,214 and represented the seat for two years, until 1908. When Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by Herbert Henry Asquith in 1908, Churchill was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Under the law at the time, a newly appointed Cabinet Minister was obliged to seek re-election at a by-election; Churchill lost his seat but was soon back as a member for Dundee constituency. As President of the Board of Trade he joined newly appointed Chancellor Lloyd George in opposing First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna's proposed huge expenditure for the construction of Navy dreadnought warships, and in supporting the Liberal reforms. In 1908, he introduced the Trade Boards Bill setting up the first minimum wages in Britain, In 1909, he set up Labour Exchanges to help unemployed people find work. He helped draft the first unemployment pension legislation, the National Insurance Act of 1911. As a supporter of eugenics, he participated in the drafting of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, although the Act eventually passed rejected his preferred method of sterilisation of the feeble-minded in favour of their confinement in institutions. Churchill also assisted in passing the People's Budget becoming President of the Budget League, an organisation set up in response to the opposition's "Budget Protest League". The budget included the introduction of new taxes on the wealthy to allow for the creation of new social welfare programmes. After the budget bill was sent to the Commons in 1909 and passed, it went to the House of Lords, where it was vetoed. The Liberals then fought and won two general elections in January and December 1910 to gain a mandate for their reforms. The budget was then passed following the Parliament Act 1911 for which he also campaigned. In 1910, he was promoted to Home Secretary. His term was controversial, after his responses to the Siege of Sidney Street and the dispute at the Cambrian Colliery and the suffragettes.

In 1910, a number of coal miners in the Rhondda Valley began what has come to be known as the Tonypandy Riot. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan requested troops be sent in to help police quell the rioting. Churchill, learning that the troops were already travelling, allowed them to go as far as Swindon and Cardiff but blocked their deployment. On 9 November, The Times criticised this decision. In spite of this, the rumour persists that Churchill had ordered troops to attack, and his reputation in Wales and in Labour circles never recovered.

In early January 1911, Churchill made a controversial visit to the Siege of Sidney Street in London. There is some uncertainty as to whether he attempted to give operational commands, and his presence attracted much criticism. After an inquest, Arthur Balfour remarked, "he [Churchill] and a photographer were both risking valuable lives. I understand what the photographer was doing, but what was the right honourable gentleman doing?" A biographer, Roy Jenkins, suggests that he went simply because "he could not resist going to see the fun himself" and that he did not issue commands. Another account said the police had the miscreants – Latvian anarchists wanted for murder – surrounded in a house but Churchill, called in the Scots Guards from the Tower of London and, dressed in top hat and astrakhan collar greatcoat, directed operations. The house caught fire and Churchill prevented the fire brigade from dousing the flames so the men inside were burned to death. "I thought it better to let the house burn down rather than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals,"

Churchill's proposed solution to the suffragette issue was a referendum on the issue, but this found no favour with Herbert Henry Asquith and women's suffrage remained unresolved until after the First World War.

In 1911, Churchill was transferred to the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he held into the First World War. He gave impetus to several reform efforts, including development of naval aviation (he undertook flying lessons himself), the construction of new and larger warships, the development of tanks, and the switch from coal to oil in the Royal Navy.

First World War and the Post War Coalition

On 5 October 1914, Churchill went to Antwerp, which the Belgian government proposed to evacuate. The Royal Marine Brigade was there and at Churchill's urgings the 1st and 2nd Naval Brigades were also committed. Antwerp fell on 10 October with the loss of 2500 men. At the time he was attacked for squandering resources. It is more likely that his actions prolonged the resistance by a week (Belgium had proposed surrendering Antwerp on 3 October) and that this time saved Calais and Dunkirk.

Churchill was involved with the development of the tank, which was financed from naval research funds. He then headed the Landships Committee which was responsible for creating the first tank corps and, although a decade later development of the battle tank would be seen as a tactical victory, at the time it was seen as misappropriation of funds. In 1915, he was one of the political and military engineers of the disastrous Gallipoli landings on the Dardanelles during the First World War. He took much of the blame for the fiasco, and when Prime Minister Asquith formed an all-party coalition government, the Conservatives demanded his demotion as the price for entry.

For several months Churchill served in the sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. However on 15 November 1915 he resigned from the government, feeling his energies were not being used and, though remaining an MP, served for several months on the Western Front commanding the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. While in command he personally made 36 forays into no man's land, and his section of the front at Ploegsteert became one of the most active. In March 1916, Churchill returned to England after he had become restless in France and wished to speak again in the House of Commons. Future prime minister David Lloyd George acidly commented: "You will one day discover that the state of mind revealed in (your) letter is the reason why you do not win trust even where you command admiration. In every line of it, national interests are completely overshadowed by your personal concern." In July 1917, Churchill was appointed Minister of Munitions, and in January 1919, Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air. He was the main architect of the Ten Year Rule, a principle that allowed the Treasury to dominate and control strategic, foreign and financial policies under the assumption that "there would be no great European war for the next five or ten years".

A major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention, declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle". He secured, from a divided and loosely organised Cabinet, intensification and prolongation of the British involvement beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation—and in the face of the bitter hostility of Labour. In 1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn, Churchill was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they invaded Ukraine. He became Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921 and was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State. Churchill was involved in the lengthy negotiations of the treaty and to protect British maritime interests, he engineered part of the Irish Free State agreement to include three Treaty Ports—Queenstown (Cobh), Berehaven and Lough Swilly—which could be used as Atlantic bases by the Royal Navy. In 1938, however, under the terms of the Chamberlain-De Valera Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement the bases were returned to the Irish Free State.

Churchill advocated the use of tear gas on Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq, Though the British did consider the use of poison gas in putting down Kurdish rebellions, it was not used, as conventional bombing was considered effective.

In 1923, he acted as a paid consultant for Burmah Oil (now BP plc) to lobby the British government to allow Burmah to have exclusive rights to Persian (Iraqi) oil resources, which were successfully granted.

Rejoining the Conservative Party—Chancellor of the Exchequer

In September, the Conservative Party withdrew from the Coalition government following a meeting of backbenchers dissatisfied with the handling of the Chanak Crisis, a move that precipitated the looming October 1922 General Election. Churchill fell ill during the campaign, and had to have an appendicectomy. This made it difficult for him to campaign, and a further setback was the internal division that continued to beset the Liberal Party. He came only fourth in the poll for Dundee, losing to the prohibitionist Edwin Scrymgeour. Churchill later quipped that he left Dundee "without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix". He stood for the Liberals again in the 1923 general election, losing in Leicester, and then as an independent, first without success in a by-election in the Westminster Abbey constituency, and then successfully in the general election of 1924 for Epping. The following year, he formally rejoined the Conservative Party, commenting wryly that "anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat."

Churchill was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924 under Stanley Baldwin and oversaw Britain's disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted in deflation, unemployment, and the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926. His decision, announced in the 1924 Budget, came after long consultation with various economists including John Maynard Keynes, the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Otto Niemeyer and the board of the Bank of England. This decision prompted Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, arguing that the return to the gold standard at the pre-war parity in 1925 (£1=$4.86) would lead to a world depression. However, the decision was generally popular and seen as 'sound economics' although it was opposed by Lord Beaverbrook and the Federation of British Industries.

Churchill later regarded this as the greatest mistake of his life. However in discussions at the time with former Chancellor McKenna, Churchill acknowledged that the return to the gold standard and the resulting 'dear money' policy was economically bad. In those discussions he maintained the policy as fundamentally political—a return to the pre-war conditions in which he believed. In his speech on the Bill he said "I will tell you what it [the return to the Gold Standard] will shackle us to. It will shackle us to reality."

The return to the pre-war exchange rate and to the Gold Standard depressed industries. The most affected was the coal industry. Already suffering from declining output as shipping switched to oil, as basic British industries like cotton came under more competition in export markets, the return to the pre-war exchange was estimated to add up to 10% in costs to the industry. In July 1925, a Commission of Inquiry reported generally favouring the miners, rather than the mine owners' position. Baldwin, with Churchill's support proposed a subsidy to the industry while a Royal Commission prepared a further report.

That Commission solved nothing and the miners' dispute led to the General Strike of 1926, Churchill was reported to have suggested that machine guns be used on the striking miners. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, and, during the dispute, he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country" and claimed that the fascism of Benito Mussolini had "rendered a service to the whole world," showing, as it had, "a way to combat subversive forces"—that is, he considered the regime to be a bulwark against the perceived threat of Communist revolution. At one point, Churchill went as far as to call Mussolini the "Roman genius... the greatest lawgiver among men."

Later economists, as well as people at the time, also criticised Churchill's budget measures. These were seen as assisting the generally prosperous rentier banking and salaried classes (to which Churchill and his associates generally belonged) at the expense of manufacturers and exporters which were known then to be suffering from imports and from competition in traditional export markets, and as paring the Armed Forces too heavily.

Political isolation

The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 General Election. Churchill did not seek election to the Conservative Business Committee, the official leadership of the Conservative MPs. Over the next two years, Churchill became estranged from the Conservative leadership over the issues of protective tariffs and Indian Home Rule and by his political views and by his friendships with press barons, financiers and people whose characters were seen as dubious. When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931, Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet. He was at the low point in his career, in a period known as "the wilderness years".

He spent much of the next few years concentrating on his writing, including Marlborough: His Life and Times—a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough—and A History of the English Speaking Peoples (though the latter was not published until well after the Second World War), Great Contemporaries and many newspaper articles and collections of speeches. He was one of the best paid writers of his time. His political views, set forth in his 1930 Romanes Election and published as Parliamentary Government and the Economic Problem (republished in 1932 in his collection of essays "Thoughts and Adventures") involved abandoning universal suffrage, a return to a property franchise, proportional representation for the major cities and an economic 'sub parliament'.

Indian independence

Churchill opposed Mohandas Gandhi's peaceful disobedience revolt and the Indian Independence movement in the 1930s, arguing that the Round Table Conference "was a frightful prospect". Later reports indicate that Churchill favoured letting Gandhi die if he went on a hunger strike. During the first half of the 1930s, Churchill was outspoken in his opposition to granting Dominion status to India. He was a founder of the India Defence League, a group dedicated to the preservation of British power in India. Churchill brooked no moderation. "The truth is," he declared in 1930, "that Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed." In speeches and press articles in this period he forecast widespread unemployment in Britain and civil strife in India should independence be granted. The Viceroy Lord Irwin, who had been appointed by the prior Conservative Government, engaged in the Round Table Conference in early 1931 and then announced the Government's policy that India should be granted Dominion Status. In this the Government was supported by the Liberal Party and, officially at least, by the Conservative Party. Churchill denounced the Round Table Conference.

At a meeting of the West Essex Conservative Association specially convened so Churchill could explain his position he said, "It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace... to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor." He called the Indian National Congress leaders "Brahmins who mouth and patter principles of Western Liberalism".

Two incidents damaged Churchill's reputation greatly within the Conservative Party in this period. Both were taken as attacks on the Conservative front bench. The first was his speech on the eve of the St George by-election in April 1931. In a secure Conservative seat, the official Conservative candidate Duff Cooper was opposed by an independent Conservative. The independent was supported by Lord Rothermere, Lord Beaverbrook and their respective newspapers. Although arranged before the by-election was set, Churchill's speech was seen as supporting the independent candidate and as a part of the press baron's campaign against Baldwin. Baldwin's position was strengthened when Duff Cooper won, and when the civil disobedience campaign in India ceased with the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. The second issue was a claim by Churchill that Sir Samuel Hoare and Lord Derby had pressured the Manchester Chamber of Commerce to change evidence it had given to the Joint Select Committee considering the Government of India Bill, and in doing so had breached Parliamentary privilege. He had the matter referred to the House of Commons Privilege Committee which after investigations, in which Churchill gave evidence, reported to the House that there had been no breach. The report was debated on 13 June. Churchill was unable to find a single supporter in the House and the debate ended without a division.

Churchill permanently broke with Stanley Baldwin over Indian independence and never held any office while Baldwin was prime minister. Some historians see his basic attitude to India as being set out in his book My Early Life (1930). Another source of controversy about Churchill's attitude towards Indian affairs arises over what some historians term the Indian 'nationalist approach' to the Bengal famine of 1943, which has sought to place significant blame on Churchill's wartime government for the excessive mortality of up to three million people. While some commentators point to the disruption of the traditional marketing system and maladministration at the provincial level, Arthur Herman, author of Churchill and Gandhi, contends, 'The real cause was the fall of Burma to the Japanese, which cut off India's main supply of rice imports when domestic sources fell short...[though] it is true that Churchill opposed diverting food supplies and transports from other theatres to India to cover the shortfall: this was wartime.' In response to an urgent request by the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, and Viceroy of India, Wavell, to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, "why Gandhi hadn't died yet." In July 1940, newly in office, he welcomed reports of the emerging conflict between the Muslim League and the Indian Congress, hoping "it would be bitter and bloody".

German rearmament and conflicts in Europe and Asia

Beginning in 1932, when he opposed those who advocated giving Germany the right to military parity with France, Churchill spoke often of the dangers of Germany's rearmament. He later, particularly in The Gathering Storm, portrayed himself as being for a time, a lone voice calling on Britain to strengthen itself to counter the belligerence of Germany. However Lord Lloyd was the first to so agitate. Churchill's attitude toward the fascist dictators was ambiguous. In 1931, he warned against the League of Nations opposing the Japanese in Manchuria "I hope we shall try in England to understand the position of Japan, an ancient state.... On the one side they have the dark menace of Soviet Russia. On the other the chaos of China, four or five provinces of which are being tortured under Communist rule". In contemporary newspaper articles he referred to the Spanish Republican government as a Communist front, and Franco's army as the "Anti-red movement". He supported the Hoare-Laval Pact and continued up until 1937 to praise Benito Mussolini.

Speaking in the House of Commons in 1937, Churchill said "I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and Nazism, I would choose communism". In a 1935 essay titled "Hitler and his Choice", which was republished in his 1937 book Great Contemporaries, Churchill expressed a hope that Hitler, if he so chose, and despite his rise to power through dictatorial action, hatred and cruelty, might yet "go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation and brought it back serene, helpful and strong to the forefront of the European family circle." Churchill's first major speech on defence on 7 February 1934 stressed the need to rebuild the Royal Air Force and to create a Ministry of Defence; his second, on 13 July urged a renewed role for the League of Nations. These three topics remained his themes until early 1936. In 1935, he was one of the founding members of The Focus, which brought together people of differing political backgrounds and occupations who were united in seeking "the defence of freedom and peace". The Focus led to the formation of the much wider Arms and the Covenant Movement in 1936.

Churchill was holidaying in Spain when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland in February 1936, and returned to a divided Britain. The Labour opposition was adamant in opposing sanctions and the National Government was divided between advocates of economic sanctions and those who said that even these would lead to a humiliating backdown by Britain as France would not support any intervention. Churchill's speech on 9 March was measured, and praised by Neville Chamberlain as constructive. But within weeks Churchill was passed over for the post of Minister for Co-ordination of Defence in favour of the Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip. Alan Taylor called this "an appointment rightly described as the most extraordinary since Caligula made his horse a consul". In June 1936, Churchill organised a deputation of senior Conservatives who shared his concern to see Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax. He had tried to have delegates from the other two parties and later wrote, "If the leaders of the Labour and Liberal oppositions had come with us there might have been a political situation so intense as to enforce remedial action". As it was the meeting achieved little, Baldwin arguing that the Government was doing all it could, given the anti-war feeling of the electorate.

On 12 November Churchill returned to the topic. Speaking in the Address in Reply debate, after giving some specific instances of Germany's war preparedness, he said "The Government simply cannot make up their mind or they cannot get the prime minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful for impotency. And so we go on preparing more months more years precious perhaps vital for the greatness of Britain for the locusts to eat."

R. R. James called this one of Churchill's most brilliant speeches in this period, Baldwin's reply sounding weak and disturbing the House. The exchange gave new encouragement to the Arms and the Covenant Movement.

Abdication crisis

In June 1936, Walter Monckton told Churchill that the rumours that King Edward VIII intended to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson were true. Churchill then advised against the marriage and said he regarded Mrs Simpson's existing marriage as a 'safeguard'. In November, he declined Lord Salisbury's invitation to be part of a delegation of senior Conservative backbenchers who met with Baldwin to discuss the matter. On 25 November he, Attlee and Liberal leader Archibald Sinclair met with Baldwin, were told officially of the King's intention, and asked whether they would form an administration if Baldwin and the National Government resigned should the King not take the Ministry's advice. Both Attlee and Sinclair said they would not take office if invited to do so. Churchill's reply was that his attitude was a little different but he would support the government.

The Abdication crisis became public, coming to a head in the first fortnight of December 1936. At this time Churchill publicly gave his support to the King. The first public meeting of the Arms and the Covenant Movement was on 3 December. Churchill was a major speaker and later wrote that in replying to the Vote of Thanks he made a declaration 'on the spur of the moment' asking for delay before any decision was made by either the King or his Cabinet. Later that night Churchill saw the draft of the King's proposed wireless broadcast and spoke with Beaverbrook and the King's solicitor about it. On 4 December, he met with the King and again urged delay in any decision about abdication. On 5 December, he issued a lengthy statement implying that the Ministry was applying unconstitutional pressure on the King to force him to make a hasty decision. On 7 December he tried to address the Commons to plead for delay. He was shouted down. Seemingly staggered by the unanimous hostility of all Members he left.

Churchill's reputation in Parliament and England as a whole was badly damaged. Some such as Alistair Cooke saw him as trying to build a King's Party. Others like Harold Macmillan were dismayed by the damage Churchill's support for the King had done to the Arms and the Covenant Movement. Churchill himself later wrote "I was myself smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was ended." Historians are divided about Churchill's motives in his support for Edward VIII. Some such as A J P Taylor see it as being an attempt to 'overthrow the government of feeble men'. Others such as Rhode James see Churchill's motives as entirely honourable and disinterested, that he felt deeply for the King.

Return from exile

Churchill later sought to portray himself as (to some extent) an isolated voice warning of the need to rearm against Germany. While it is true that he had a small following in the House of Commons during much of the 1930s he was given privileged information by some elements within the Government, particularly by disaffected civil servants in the War Ministry. The "Churchill group" in the later half of the decade consisted only of himself, Duncan Sandys and Brendan Bracken. It was isolated from the other main factions within the Conservative Party pressing for faster rearmament and a stronger foreign policy. Churchill continued to be consulted on many matters by the Government or seen as an alternative leader.

Even during the time Churchill was campaigning against Indian independence, he received official and otherwise secret information. From 1932, Churchill's neighbour, Major Desmond Morton with Ramsay MacDonald's approval, gave Churchill information on German air power. From 1930 onwards Morton headed a department of the Committee of Imperial Defence charged with researching the defence preparedness of other nations. Lord Swinton as Secretary of State for Air, and with Baldwin's approval, in 1934 gave Churchill access to official and otherwise secret information.

Swinton did so, knowing Churchill would remain a critic of the government, but believing that an informed critic was better than one relying on rumour and hearsay. Churchill was a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Adolf Hitler and in a speech to the House of Commons, he bluntly and prophetically stated, "You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war."

First term as prime minister

"Winston is back"

After the outbreak of the Second World War on 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and a member of the War Cabinet, as he had been during the first part of the First World War. When they were informed, the Board of the Admiralty sent a signal to the Fleet: "Winston is back". In this job, he proved to be one of the highest-profile ministers during the so-called "Phoney War", when the only noticeable action was at sea. Churchill advocated the pre-emptive occupation of the neutral Norwegian iron-ore port of Narvik and the iron mines in Kiruna, Sweden, early in the war. However, Chamberlain and the rest of the War Cabinet disagreed, and the operation was delayed until the successful German invasion of Norway.

Bitter beginnings of the war

On 10 May 1940, hours before the German invasion of France by a lightning advance through the Low Countries, it became clear that, following failure in Norway, the country had no confidence in Chamberlain's prosecution of the war and so Chamberlain resigned. The commonly accepted version of events states that Lord Halifax turned down the post of prime minister because he believed he could not govern effectively as a member of the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons. Although the prime minister does not traditionally advise the King on the former's successor, Chamberlain wanted someone who would command the support of all three major parties in the House of Commons. A meeting between Chamberlain, Halifax, Churchill and David Margesson, the government Chief Whip, led to the recommendation of Churchill, and, as a constitutional monarch, George VI asked Churchill to be prime minister. Churchill's first act was to write to Chamberlain to thank him for his support.

Churchill had been among the first to recognise the growing threat of Hitler long before the outset of the Second World War, and his warnings had gone largely unheeded. Although there was an element of British public and political sentiment favouring negotiated peace with a clearly ascendant Germany, among them the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, Churchill nonetheless refused to consider an armistice with Hitler's Germany. His use of rhetoric hardened public opinion against a peaceful resolution and prepared the British for a long war. Coining the general term for the upcoming battle, Churchill stated in his "finest hour" speech to the House of Commons on 18 June 1940, "I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin." By refusing an armistice with Germany, Churchill kept resistance alive in the British Empire and created the basis for the later Allied counter-attacks of 1942–45, with Britain serving as a platform for the supply of Soviet Union and the liberation of Western Europe.

In response to previous criticisms that there had been no clear single minister in charge of the prosecution of the war, Churchill created and took the additional position of Minister of Defence. He immediately put his friend and confidant, the industrialist and newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, in charge of aircraft production. It was Beaverbrook's business acumen that allowed Britain to quickly gear up aircraft production and engineering that eventually made the difference in the war.

Churchill's speeches were a great inspiration to the embattled British. His first speech as prime minister was the famous "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat". He followed that closely with two other equally famous ones, given just before the Battle of Britain. One included the words:

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At the height of the Battle of Britain, his bracing survey of the situation included the memorable line "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", which engendered the enduring nickname The Few for the RAF fighter pilots who won it. He first spoke these famous words upon his exit from No. 11 Group's underground bunker at RAF Uxbridge, now known as the Battle of Britain Bunker on 16 August 1940. One of his most memorable war speeches came on 10 November 1942 at the Lord Mayor's Luncheon at Mansion House in London, in response to the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Churchill stated: }}

Without having much in the way of sustenance or good news to offer the British people, he took a risk in deliberately choosing to emphasise the dangers instead.

"Rhetorical power", wrote Churchill, "is neither wholly bestowed, nor wholly acquired, but cultivated." Not all were impressed by his oratory. Robert Menzies, prime minister of Australia and himself a gifted phrase-maker, said of Churchill during the Second World War: "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way." Another associate wrote: "He is... the slave of the words which his mind forms about ideas.... And he can convince himself of almost every truth if it is once allowed thus to start on its wild career through his rhetorical machinery."

Relations with the United States

Churchill's good relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt secured vital food, oil and munitions via the North Atlantic shipping routes. It was for this reason that Churchill was relieved when Roosevelt was re-elected in 1940. Upon re-election, Roosevelt immediately set about implementing a new method of providing military hardware and shipping to Britain without the need for monetary payment. Put simply, Roosevelt persuaded Congress that repayment for this immensely costly service would take the form of defending the US; and so Lend-lease was born. Churchill had 12 strategic conferences with Roosevelt which covered the Atlantic Charter, Europe first strategy, the Declaration by the United Nations and other war policies. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, Churchill's first thought in anticipation of US help was, "We have won the war!" On 26 December 1941, Churchill addressed a joint meeting of the US Congress, asking of Germany and Japan, "What kind of people do they think we are?" Churchill initiated the Special Operations Executive (SOE) under Hugh Dalton's Ministry of Economic Warfare, which established, conducted and fostered covert, subversive and partisan operations in occupied territories with notable success; and also the Commandos which established the pattern for most of the world's current Special Forces. The Russians referred to him as the "British Bulldog".

Churchill's health was fragile, as shown by a mild heart attack he suffered in December 1941 at the White House and also in December 1943 when he contracted pneumonia. Despite this, he travelled over throughout the war to meet other national leaders. For security, he usually travelled using the alias Colonel Warden.

Churchill was party to treaties that would redraw post-Second World War European and Asian boundaries. These were discussed as early as 1943. At the Second Quebec Conference in 1944 he drafted and, together with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed a toned-down version of the original Morgenthau Plan, in which they pledged to convert Germany after its unconditional surrender "into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character." Proposals for European boundaries and settlements were officially agreed to by Harry S. Truman, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at Potsdam. Churchill's strong relationship with Harry Truman was also of great significance to both countries. While he clearly regretted the loss of his close friend and counterpart Roosevelt, Churchill was enormously supportive of Truman in his first days in office, calling him, "the type of leader the world needs when it needs him most."

Relations with the Soviet Union

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill, a vehement anti-Communist, famously stated "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons," regarding his policy toward Stalin. Soon, British supplies and tanks were flowing to help the Soviet Union.

The settlement concerning the borders of Poland, that is, the boundary between Poland and the Soviet Union and between Germany and Poland, was viewed as a betrayal in Poland during the post-war years, as it was established against the views of the Polish government in exile. It was Winston Churchill, who tried to motivate Mikołajczyk, who was prime minister of the Polish government in exile, to accept Stalin's wishes, but Mikołajczyk refused. Churchill was convinced that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the transfer of people, to match the national borders.

As he expounded in the House of Commons on 15 December 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, insofar as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions." However the resulting expulsions of Germans were carried out in a way which resulted in much hardship and, according to a 1966 report by the West German Ministry of Refugees and Displaced Persons, the death of over 2.1 million. Churchill opposed the effective annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union and wrote bitterly about it in his books, but he was unable to prevent it at the conferences.

During October 1944, he and Eden were in Moscow to meet with the Russian leadership. At this point, Russian forces were beginning to advance into various eastern European countries. Churchill held the view that until everything was formally and properly worked out at the Yalta conference, there had to be a temporary, war-time, working agreement with regard to who would run what. The most significant of these meetings were held on 9 October 1944 in the Kremlin between Churchill and Stalin. During the meeting, Poland and the Balkan problems were discussed. Churchill recounted his speech to Stalin on the day:

Stalin agreed to this Percentages Agreement, ticking a piece of paper as he heard the translation. In 1958, five years after the account of this meeting was published (in The Second World War), authorities of the Soviet Union denied that Stalin accepted the "imperialist proposal".

One of the conclusions of the Yalta Conference was that the Allies would return all Soviet citizens that found themselves in the Allied zone to the Soviet Union. This immediately affected the Soviet prisoners of war liberated by the Allies, but was also extended to all Eastern European refugees. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called the Operation Keelhaul "the last secret of World War II." The operation decided the fate of up to two million post-war refugees fleeing eastern Europe.

Dresden bombings controversy

Between 13–15 February 1945, British and US bombers attacked the German city of Dresden, which was crowded with German wounded and refugees. Because of the cultural importance of the city, and of the number of civilian casualties close to the end of the war, this remains one of the most controversial Western Allied actions of the war. Following the bombing Churchill stated in a top secret telegram:

On reflection, under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff and in response to the views expressed by Sir Charles Portal (Chief of the Air Staff,) and Sir Arthur Harris (AOC-in-C of RAF Bomber Command), among others, Churchill withdrew his memo and issued a new one. This final version of the memo completed on 1 April 1945, stated:

Ultimately, responsibility for the British part of the attack lay with Churchill, which is why he has been criticised for allowing the bombings to happen. The German historian Jörg Friedrich, claims that "Winston Churchill's decision to [area] bomb a shattered Germany between January and May 1945 was a war crime" and writing in 2006 the philosopher A. C. Grayling questioned the whole strategic bombing campaign by the RAF presenting the argument that although it was not a war crime it was a moral crime and undermines the Allies contention that they fought a just war. On the other hand, it has also been asserted that Churchill's involvement in the bombing of Dresden was based on the strategic and tactical aspects of winning the war. The destruction of Dresden, while immense, was designed to expedite the defeat of Germany. As the historian and journalist Max Hastings said in an article subtitled, "the Allied Bombing of Dresden": "I believe it is wrong to describe strategic bombing as a war crime, for this might be held to suggest some moral equivalence with the deeds of the Nazis. Bombing represented a sincere, albeit mistaken, attempt to bring about Germany's military defeat." British historian, Frederick Taylor asserts that "All sides bombed each other's cities during the war. Half a million Soviet citizens, for example, died from German bombing during the invasion and occupation of Russia. That's roughly equivalent to the number of German citizens who died from Allied raids. But the Allied bombing campaign was attached to military operations and ceased as soon as military operations ceased."

The Second World War ends

In June 1944, the Allied Forces invaded Normandy and pushed the Nazi forces back into Germany on a broad front over the coming year. After being attacked on three fronts by the Allies, and in spite of Allied failures, such as Operation Market Garden, and German counter-attacks, including the Battle of the Bulge, Germany was eventually defeated. On 7 May 1945 at the SHAEF headquarters in Rheims the Allies accepted Germany's surrender. On the same day in a BBC news flash John Snagge announced that 8 May would be Victory in Europe Day. On Victory in Europe Day, Churchill broadcast to the nation that Germany had surrendered and that a final cease fire on all fronts in Europe would come into effect at one minute past midnight that night. Afterwards, Churchill told a huge crowd in Whitehall: "This is your victory." The people shouted: "No, it is yours", and Churchill then conducted them in the singing of Land of Hope and Glory. In the evening he made another broadcast to the nation asserting the defeat of Japan in the coming months. The Japanese later surrendered on 15 August 1945.

As Europe celebrated peace at the end of six years of war, Churchill was concerned with the possibility that the celebrations would soon be brutally interrupted. He concluded that the UK and the US must prepare for the Red Army ignoring previously agreed frontiers and agreements in Europe, and prepare to "impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire." According to the Operation Unthinkable plan ordered by Churchill and developed by the British Armed Forces, the Third World War could have started on 1 July 1945 with a sudden attack against the allied Soviet troops. The plan was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible.

Leader of the opposition

Although Churchill's role in the Second World War had generated much support for him amongst the British population, he was defeated in the 1945 election. Many reasons for this have been given, key among them being that a desire for post-war reform was widespread amongst the population and that the man who had led Britain in war was not seen as the man to lead the nation in peace. It was anticipated that Churchill would step down and hand over the leadership to Anthony Eden, who became his deputy after the election defeat, but Churchill (despite now being in his seventies) was determined to fight on as leader and Eden was too loyal to challenge his leadership. It would be another decade before Churchill finally did hand over the reins to Eden.

For six years he was to serve as the Leader of the Opposition. During these years Churchill continued to have an impact on world affairs. During his March 1946 trip to the United States, Churchill famously lost a lot of money in a poker game with Harry Truman and his advisors. (He also liked to play Bezique, which he learned while serving in the Boer War.)

During this trip he gave his Iron Curtain speech about the USSR and the creation of the Eastern Bloc. Speaking on 5 March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, he declared:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.

Churchill also argued strongly for British independence from the European Coal and Steel Community, which he saw as a Franco-German project. He saw Britain's place as separate from the continent, much more in-line with the countries of the Commonwealth and the Empire, and with the United States, the so-called Anglosphere.

Churchill held the office of Deputy Lieutenant (DL) of Kent in 1949.

Second term as prime minister

Return to government and the decline of the British Empire

After the General Election of 1951, Churchill again held the office of Minister of Defence between October 1951 and January 1952. He also became prime minister in October 1951, and his third government—after the wartime national government and the brief caretaker government of 1945—lasted until his resignation in April 1955. His domestic priorities in his last government were overshadowed by a series of foreign policy crises, which were partly the result of the continued decline of British military and imperial prestige and power. Being a strong proponent of Britain as an international power, Churchill would often meet such moments with direct action. One example was his dispatch of British troops to Kenya to deal with the Mau Mau rebellion. Trying to retain what he could of the Empire, he once stated that, "I will not preside over a dismemberment."

War in Malaya

This was followed by events which became known as the Malayan Emergency. In Malaya, a rebellion against British rule had been in progress since 1948. Once again, Churchill's government inherited a crisis, and Churchill chose to use direct military action against those in rebellion while attempting to build an alliance with those who were not. While the rebellion was slowly being defeated, it was equally clear that colonial rule from Britain was no longer sustainable.

Relations with the United States

Churchill also devoted much of his time in office to Anglo-American relations and, although Churchill did not always agree with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Churchill attempted to maintain the Special Relationship with the United States. He made four official transatlantic visits to America during his second term as prime minister.

The series of strokes

Churchill had suffered a mild stroke while on holiday in the south of France in the summer of 1949. In June 1953, when he was 78, Churchill suffered a more severe stroke at 10 Downing Street. News of this was kept from the public and from Parliament, who were told that Churchill was suffering from exhaustion. He went to his country home, Chartwell, to recuperate from the effects of the stroke which had affected his speech and ability to walk. He returned to public life in October to make a speech at a Conservative Party conference at Margate. However, aware that he was slowing down both physically and mentally, Churchill retired as prime minister in 1955 and was succeeded by Anthony Eden. He suffered another mild stroke in December 1956.

Retirement and death

Elizabeth II offered to create Churchill Duke of London, but this was declined due to the objections of his son Randolph, who would have inherited the title on his father's death. After leaving the premiership, Churchill spent less time in parliament until he stood down at the 1964 General Election. As a mere "back-bencher," Churchill spent most of his retirement at Chartwell and at his home in Hyde Park Gate, in London. In the 1959 General Election Churchill's majority fell by more than a thousand, since many young voters in his constituency did not support an 85-year-old who could only enter the House of Commons in a wheelchair. As his mental and physical faculties decayed, he began to lose the battle he had fought for so long against the "black dog" of depression. There was speculation that Churchill may have had Alzheimer's disease in his last years, although others maintain that his reduced mental capacity was merely the result of a series of strokes. In 1963, US President John F. Kennedy, acting under authorisation granted by an Act of Congress, proclaimed him an Honorary Citizen of the United States, but he was unable to attend the White House ceremony. Despite poor health, Churchill still tried to remain active in public life, and on St George's Day 1964, sent a message of congratulations to the surviving veterans of the 1918 Zeebrugge Raid who were attending a service of commemoration in Deal, Kent, where two casualties of the raid were buried in the Hamilton Road Cemetery. On 15 January 1965, Churchill suffered a severe stroke that left him gravely ill. He died at his London home nine days later, at age 90, on the morning of Sunday 24 January 1965, 70 years to the day after his father's death.

Funeral

By decree of the Queen, his body lay in state for three days and a state funeral service was held at St Paul's Cathedral on 30 January 1965. Unusually, the Queen attended the funeral. As his lead-lined coffin passed up the River Thames from Tower Pier to Festival Pier on the , dockers lowered their crane jibs in a salute. The Royal Artillery fired the 19-gun salute due a head of government, and the RAF staged a fly-by of sixteen English Electric Lightning fighters. The coffin was then taken the short distance to Waterloo station where it was loaded onto a specially prepared and painted carriage as part of the funeral train for its rail journey to , seven miles north-west of Oxford. The funeral also saw one of the largest assemblages of statesmen in the world. The funeral train of Pullman coaches carrying his family mourners was hauled by Battle of Britain class steam locomotive No. 34051 Winston Churchill. In the fields along the route, and at the stations through which the train passed, thousands stood in silence to pay their last respects. At Churchill's request, he was buried in the family plot at St Martin's Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, not far from his birthplace at Blenheim Palace. Churchill's funeral van—Southern Railway van S2464S—is now part of a preservation project with the Swanage Railway, having been repatriated to the UK in 2007 from the US, to where it had been exported in 1965.

Later in 1965 a memorial to Churchill, cut by the engraver Reynolds Stone, was placed in Westminster Abbey.

Churchill as artist, historian, and writer

Winston Churchill was an accomplished artist and took great pleasure in painting, especially after his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915. He found a haven in art to overcome the spells of depression, or as he termed it, the "Black Dog", which he suffered throughout his life. As William Rees-Mogg has stated, "In his own life, he had to suffer the 'black dog' of depression. In his landscapes and still lives there is no sign of depression." Churchill was persuaded and taught to paint by his artist friend, Paul Maze, whom he met during the First World War. Maze was a great influence on Churchill's painting and became a lifelong painting companion. He is best known for his impressionist scenes of landscape, many of which were painted while on holiday in the South of France, Egypt or Morocco. He continued his hobby throughout his life and painted hundreds of paintings, many of which are on show in the studio at Chartwell as well as private collections. Some of his paintings can today be seen in the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. Emery Reves and Winston Churchill indeed were close friends and Churchill would often visit Emery and his wife in their villa in the South of France (villa La Pausa, originally built in 1927 for Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel). The villa was rebuilt within the museum in 1985 with a gallery of paintings and memorabilia from Sir Winston Churchill. Most of his paintings are oil-based and feature landscapes, but he also did a number of interior scenes and portraits.

Due to obvious time constraints, Churchill attempted only one painting during the Second World War. He completed the painting from the tower of the Villa Taylor in Marrakesh.

Despite his lifelong fame and upper-class origins, Churchill always struggled to keep his income at a level that would fund his extravagant lifestyle. MPs before 1946 received only a nominal salary (and in fact did not receive anything at all until the Parliament Act 1911) so many had secondary professions from which to earn a living. From his first book in 1898 until his second stint as Prime Minister, Churchill's income was almost entirely made from writing books and opinion pieces for newspapers and magazines. The most famous of his newspaper articles are those that appeared in the Evening Standard from 1936 warning of the rise of Hitler and the danger of the policy of appeasement.

Churchill was also a prolific writer of books, writing a novel, two biographies, three volumes of memoirs, and several histories in addition to his many newspaper articles. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". Two of his most famous works, published after his first premiership brought his international fame to new heights, were his six-volume memoir The Second World War and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; a four-volume history covering the period from Caesar's invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914).

He was also an amateur bricklayer, building garden walls and even a cottage at Chartwell. As part of this hobby he joined the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers.

Honours

In addition to the honour of a state funeral, Churchill received a wide range of awards and other honours. For example, he was the first person to become an Honorary Citizen of the United States.

In 1945, while Churchill was mentioned by Halvdan Koht as one of seven appropriate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Peace, the nomination went to Cordell Hull.

Churchill received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his numerous published works, especially his six-volume set The Second World War. In a 2002 BBC poll of the "100 Greatest Britons", he was proclaimed "The Greatest of Them All" based on approximately a million votes from BBC viewers. Churchill was also rated as one of the most influential leaders in history by TIME. Churchill College, Cambridge was founded in 1958 to memorialise him.

Honorary degrees

University of Rochester (LLD) in 1941

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (LLD) in 1943

McGill University in Montreal, Canada (LLD) in 1944

Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri 5 March 1946

Leiden University in Leiden, Netherlands, honorary doctorate in 1946

University of Miami in Miami, Florida in 1947

University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark (PhD) in 1950

Ancestors

{{ahnentafel-compact5 |style=font-size: 90%; line-height: 110%; |border=1 |boxstyle=padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; |boxstyle_1=background-color: #fcc; |boxstyle_2=background-color: #fb9; |boxstyle_3=background-color: #ffc; |boxstyle_4=background-color: #bfc; |boxstyle_5=background-color: #9fe; |1=1. Winston Churchill |2=2. Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill |3=3. Jennie Jerome |4=4. John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough |5=5. Lady Frances Vane-Stewart |6=6. Leonard Walter Jerome |7=7. Clarissa Hall |8=8. George Spencer-Churchill, 6th Duke of Marlborough |9=9. Lady Jane Stewart |10=10. Charles Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry |11=11. Lady Frances Vane-Tempest |12=12. Isaac Jerome |13=13. Aurora Murray |14=14. Ambrose Hall |15=15. Clarissa Willcox |16=16. George Spencer-Churchill, 5th Duke of Marlborough |17=17. Lady Susan Stewart |18=18. George Stewart, 8th Earl of Galloway |19=19. Lady Jane Bailey Paget |20=20. Robert Stewart, 1st Marquess of Londonderry |21=21. Lady Frances Pratt |22=22. Sir Henry Vane-Tempest, 2nd Baronet of Wynyard |23=23. Anne Katherine McDonnell, 2nd Countess of Antrim |24=24. Aaron Jerome |25=25. Elizabeth Ball |26=26. Reuben Murray |27=27. Sarah Guthrie |28=28. Ambrose Hall |29=29. Mehitable Beach |30=30. David Willcox |31=31. Anna Baker }}

Portrayal in film and television

Churchill has been portrayed in film and television on more than 100 occasions. Portrayals of Churchill include Dudley Field Malone (An American in Paris, 1951), Peter Sellers (The Man Who Never Was, 1956), Richard Burton (Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years, 1961), Simon Ward ("Young Winston", 1972), Warren Clarke (Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, 1974), Wensley Pithey (Edward and Mrs Simpson, 1978), William Hootkins (The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, 1981), Robert Hardy (War and Remembrance, 1989), Albert Finney ("The Gathering Storm", 2002), Ian Mune ("Ike: Countdown to D-Day", 2004), Rod Taylor (Inglourious Basterds, 2009), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009), Ian McNeice (Doctor Who, 2010), and Timothy Spall (The King's Speech, 2010).

See also

Cultural depictions of Winston Churchill

List of people on the cover of Time Magazine: 1920s – 14 April 1923, 11 May 1925

Politics of the United Kingdom

Winston Churchill Memorial Trusts

References

Notes

Primary sources

Churchill, Winston. The World Crisis. 6 vols. (1923–31); one-vol. ed. (2005). [On World War I.]

 –––. The Second World War. 6 vols. (1948–53)

Coombs, David, ed., with Minnie Churchill. Sir Winston Churchill: His Life through His Paintings. Fwd. by Mary Soames. Pegasus, 2003. ISBN 0-7624-2731-0. [Other editions entitled Sir Winston Churchill's Life and His Paintings and Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and His Paintings. Includes illustrations of approx. 500–534 paintings by Churchill.]

Edwards, Ron. Eastcote: From Village to Suburb (1987). Uxbridge: London Borough of Hillingdon ISBN 0907869092

Gilbert, Martin. In Search of Churchill: A Historian's Journey (1994). [Memoir about editing the following multi-volume work.]

 –––, ed. Winston S. Churchill. An 8 volume biography begun by Randolph Churchill, supported by 15 companion vols. of official and unofficial documents relating to Churchill. 1966–

:I. Youth, 1874–1900 (2 vols., 1966); :II. Young Statesman, 1901–1914 (3 vols., 1967); :III. The Challenge of War, 1914–1916 (3 vols., 1973). ISBN 0-395-16974-7 (10) and ISBN 978-0-395-16974-2 (13); :IV. The Stricken World, 1916–1922 (2 vols., 1975); :V. The Prophet of Truth, 1923–1939 (3 vols., 1977); :VI. Finest Hour, 1939–1941: The Churchill War Papers (2 vols., 1983); :VII. Road to Victory, 1941–1945 (4 vols., 1986); :VIII. Never Despair, 1945–1965 (3 vols., 1988).

James, Robert Rhodes, ed. Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963. 8 vols. London: Chelsea, 1974.

Knowles, Elizabeth. The Oxford Dictionary of Twentieth Century Quotations. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-860103-4. ISBN 978-0-19-860103-6. ISBN 0-19-866250-5. ISBN 978-0-19-866250-1.

Loewenheim, Francis L. and Harold D. Langley, eds; Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (1975).

Secondary sources

Davis, Richard Harding. Real Soldiers of Fortune (1906). Early biography. Project Gutenberg etext, wikisource here

Gilbert, Martin. Churchill: A Life (1992). ISBN 0-8050-2396-8. [One-volume version of 8-volume biography.]

Haffner, Sebastian. Winston Churchill (1967).

Hastings, Max. Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord, 1940–45. London, HarperPress, 2009. ISBN 9780007263677

Hennessy, P. Prime minister: the office and its holders since 1945 (2001).

Hitchens, Christopher. "The Medals of His Defeats", The Atlantic Monthly (April 2002).

James, Robert Rhodes. Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939 (1970).

Jenkins, Roy. Churchill: A Biography (2001).

Kersaudy, François. Churchill and De Gaulle (1981). ISBN 0-00-216328-4.

Krockow, Christian. Churchill: Man of the Century. [1900–1999]. ISBN 1-902809-43-2.

Lukacs, John. Churchill : Visionary, Statesman, Historian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Manchester, William. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932–1940 (1988). ISBN 0-316-54512-0.

 –––. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 (2010).

 –––. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874–1932 (1983). ISBN 0-316-54503-1.

Massie, Robert. Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War. ISBN 1-84413-528-4). [Chapters 40–41 concern Churchill at Admiralty.]

Pelling, Henry. Winston Churchill (1974). ISBN 1-84022-218-2. [Comprehensive biography.]

Rasor, Eugene L. Winston S. Churchill, 1874–1965: A Comprehensive Historiography and Annotated Bibliography. Greenwood Press, 2000. ISBN 0-313-30546-3 [Entries include several thousand books and scholarly articles.]

Soames, Mary, ed. Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (1998).

Stansky, Peter, ed. Churchill: A Profile (1973) [Perspectives on Churchill by leading scholars]

Storr, Anthony. Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. New Edition ed., 1997. ISBN 9780006375661

Toye, Richard. Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made. Macmillan. 2010. ISBN 9780230703841

External links

Works by Winston Churchill at Project Gutenberg

Winston Churchill Memorial and Library at Westminster College, Missouri

Churchill College Biography of Winston Churchill

FBI files on Winston Churchill

The Real Churchill (critical) and a rebuttal

A Rebuttal to "The Real Churchill"

Online bibliography of books on Churchill

Online gallery of Churchill's numerous oil paintings

Key records about Winston Churchill at The National Archives of the United Kingdom

Collected Churchill Podcasts and speeches

The Churchill Centre website

Churchill and the Great Republic Exhibition explores Churchill's relationship with the US

War Cabinet Minutes (1942), (1942–43), (1945–46), (1946)

Locations of correspondence and papers of Churchill at The National Archives of the UK

The History Channel: Winston Churchill

EarthStation1: Winston Churchill Speech Audio Archive

Imperial War Museum: Churchill War Rooms. Comprising the original underground War Rooms preserved since 1945, including the Cabinet Room, the Map Room and Churchill's bedroom, and the new Museum dedicated to Churchill's life.

|years=1900–1906}}

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af:Winston Churchill ar:ونستون تشرشل an:Winston Churchill ast:Winston Churchill az:Uinston Çörçill bn:উইনস্টন চার্চিল zh-min-nan:Winston Churchill be:Уінстан Чэрчыль be-x-old:Ўінстан Чэрчыль bcl:Winston Churchill bo:ཝིན་སུ་ཏོན་ཆུར་ཆེལ། bs:Winston Churchill br:Winston Churchill bg:Уинстън Чърчил ca:Winston Churchill cv:Уинстон Черчилль cs:Winston Churchill cy:Winston Churchill da:Winston Churchill de:Winston Churchill et:Winston Churchill el:Ουίνστον Τσώρτσιλ es:Winston Churchill eo:Winston Churchill eu:Winston Churchill fa:وینستون چرچیل hif:Winston Churchill fr:Winston Churchill fy:Winston Churchill ga:Winston Churchill gv:Winston Churchill gd:Winston Churchill gl:Winston Churchill gan:邱吉爾 ko:윈스턴 처칠 hy:Ուինսթոն Չերչիլ hi:विन्सटन चर्चिल hr:Winston Churchill io:Winston Churchill id:Winston Churchill is:Winston Churchill it:Winston Churchill he:וינסטון צ'רצ'יל jv:Winston Churchill kn:ವಿನ್‌ಸ್ಟನ್‌ ಚರ್ಚಿಲ್‌ ka:უინსტონ ჩერჩილი kk:Уинстон Черчилль ky:Черчилл, Уинстон sw:Winston Churchill ku:Winston Churchill la:Winston Churchill lv:Vinstons Čērčils lb:Winston Churchill lt:Winston Churchill hu:Winston Churchill mk:Винстон Черчил ml:വിൻസ്റ്റൺ ചർച്ചിൽ mr:विन्स्टन चर्चिल arz:وينستون تشرشيل ms:Sir Winston Churchill mn:Уинстон Черчилль my:ချာချီ၊ ဆာဝင်စတန်၊ လင်းနတ်၊ စပင်ဆာ nl:Winston Churchill ja:ウィンストン・チャーチル nap:Winston Churchill no:Winston Churchill nn:Winston Churchill oc:Winston Churchill uz:Winston Churchill pnb:چرچل ps:وېنسټون چرچل pms:Winston Churchill pl:Winston Churchill pt:Winston Churchill ro:Winston Churchill qu:Winston Churchill rue:Вінстон Черчіл ru:Черчилль, Уинстон sa:विन्स्टन चर्चिल sco:Winston Churchill scn:Winston Churchill si:වින්ස්ටන් චර්චිල් simple:Winston Churchill sk:Winston Churchill sl:Winston Churchill szl:Winston Churchill ckb:وینستۆن چێرچیل sr:Винстон Черчил sh:Sir Winston Churchill fi:Winston Churchill sv:Winston Churchill tl:Winston Churchill ta:வின்ஸ்டன் சர்ச்சில் tt:Уинстон Черчилль th:วินสตัน เชอร์ชิลล์ tg:Винстон Чирчил tr:Winston Churchill uk:Вінстон Черчилль ur:ونسٹن چرچل vi:Winston Churchill fiu-vro:Churchilli Winston war:Winston Churchill yi:ווינסטאן טשערטשיל yo:Winston Churchill zh-yue:邱吉爾 bat-smg:Winston Churchill zh:温斯顿·丘吉尔

Paul Masson (1859 – 1940) was an early pioneer of California viticulture and successful popularizer of Californian sparkling wine.

Biography

Masson emigrated from the Burgundy region of France in 1878 to California, United States, where he met Charles Lefranc, one of a number of French immigrants who had expanded the viticulture introduced into the Santa Clara Valley by the Catholic mission fathers. Masson went back to France in 1880, but later returned to California due to the depression in the French wine industry caused by the Phylloxera plague. According to the Paul Masson company web site, in 1892 Masson's first sparkling wine under the name "champagne" was introduced at Almaden, and Masson eventually became known as the "Champagne King of California".

Paul Masson winery and brand

Masson shifted part of his production to the Santa Cruz Mountains above Saratoga, California and built his "chateau" on a knob overlooking the Santa Clara Valley in 1905. Now known as "The Mountain Winery", the Paul Masson Mountain Winery is on the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places. Various events are held at the winery, such as concert series, weddings, and other special events. A famous chess tournament was held there annually for a number of years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Paul Masson winery and brand were acquired by Vintners International in 1990. Vintners was in turn purchased by Centera Wine Company (formerly "Canandaigua") in 1993 as part of Vintner's bankruptcy proceedings. Canandaigua was renamed Constellation Brands in 2000.

In 2008, Wine Group LLC of San Francisco purchased Paul Masson and two other California wine brands.

The Paul Masson brand is best remembered for its 1970s marketing association with Orson Welles, who promised for Masson: "We will sell no wine before its time." An infamous outtake for one commercial from the Orson Welles campaign features Welles attempting to deliver his lines while very severely inebriated. Despite a lucrative contract which included a clause allowing for generous quantities of free wine, Welles was subsequently sacked from the Paul Masson commercials in the early 1980s after admitting on a US talk show that he never drank Paul Masson wine.

References

Category:1859 births Category:1940 deaths Category:People from the San Francisco Bay Area Category:Viticulturists

Coordinates	23°31′58″N46°47′58″N
name	James Stewart
birth name	James Maitland Stewart
birth date	May 20, 1908
birth place	Indiana, Pennsylvania, United States
death date	July 02, 1997
death place	Beverly Hills, California, United States
resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California
other names	Jimmy Stewart
occupation	Actor
years active	1932–1991
spouse	Gloria Hatrick (1949–1994) (her death) 2 children

}} James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American film and stage actor, known for his distinctive voice and his everyman persona. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.

Throughout his seven decades in Hollywood, Stewart cultivated a versatile career and recognized screen image in such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, Harvey, It's a Wonderful Life, Shenandoah, Rear Window, Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Shop Around the Corner, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Vertigo. He is the most represented leading actor on the AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) and AFI's 10 Top 10 lists. He is also the most represented leading actor on the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time list presented by Entertainment Weekly. As of 2007, ten of his films have been inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

Stewart left his mark on a wide range of film genres, including westerns, suspense thrillers, family films, biographies and screwball comedies. He worked for a number of renowned directors later in his career, most notably Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, George Cukor, and Anthony Mann. He won many of the industry's highest honors and earned Lifetime Achievement awards from every major film organization. He died at age 89, leaving behind a legacy of classic performances, and is considered one of the finest actors of the "Golden Age of Hollywood". He was named the third Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.

Early life and career

James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store. Stewart's parents were of Scottish Presbyterian origin. His Jackson ancestors served in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. The eldest of three children (he had two younger sisters, Virginia and Mary), he was expected to continue his father's business, which had been in the family for three generations.

His mother was an excellent pianist but his father discouraged Stewart's request for lessons. But when his father accepted a gift of an accordion from a guest, young Stewart quickly learned to play the instrument, which became a fixture off-stage during his acting career. As the family grew, music continued to be an important part of family life.

Stewart attended Mercersburg Academy prep school, graduating in 1928. He was active in a variety of activities. He played on the football and track teams, was art editor of the KARUX yearbook, and a member of the choir club, glee club, and John Marshall Literary Society. During his first summer break, Stewart returned to Indiana, Pennsylvania, to work as a brick loader for a local construction company and on highway and road construction jobs where he painted lines on the roads. Over the following two summers, he took a job as an assistant with a professional magician. He also made his first appearance on the stage at Mercersburg, as Buquet in the play The Wolves.

A shy child, Stewart spent much of his after-school time in the basement working on model airplanes, mechanical drawing and chemistry—all with a dream of going into aviation. But he abandoned visions of being a pilot when his father insisted that instead of the United States Naval Academy he attend Princeton University.

Stewart enrolled at Princeton in 1928 as a member of the class of 1932. He excelled at studying architecture, so impressing his professors with his thesis on an airport design that he was awarded a scholarship for graduate studies; but he gradually became attracted to the school's drama and music clubs, including the Princeton Triangle Club. He was a member of the Princeton Charter Club as well as a head cheerleader. In his spare time, he enjoyed going to the movies at the time when 'talkies' were just displacing silent films. His acting and accordion talents at Princeton led him to be invited to the University Players, an intercollegiate summer stock company in West Falmouth, a town on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The company had been organized in 1928 and would run until 1932, with Joshua Logan, Bretaigne Windust, and Charles Leatherbee as directors. Stewart performed in bit parts in the Players' productions in Cape Cod during the summer of 1932, after he graduated. The troupe had previously included Henry Fonda, who married Margaret Sullavan on Christmas Day 1931, while the University Players were in Baltimore, Maryland, for an 18-week winter season. Sullavan, who had rejoined the University Players in Baltimore in November 1931 at the close of the post-Broadway tour of A Modern Virgin, left the Players for good at the end of The Trial of Mary Dugan in Baltimore in March 1932. By the time Stewart joined the University Players on Cape Cod after his graduation from Princeton in 1932, Fonda and Sullavan's brief marriage had ended. Stewart and Fonda became great friends over the summer of 1932 when they shared an apartment with Joshua Logan and Myron McCormick. When Stewart came to New York at the end of the summer stock season, which had included the Broadway try-out of Goodbye Again, he shared an apartment with Fonda, who had by then finalized his divorce from Sullavan. Along with fellow University Players Alfred Dalrymple and Myron McCormick, Stewart debuted on Broadway as a chauffeur in the comedy Goodbye Again, in which he had two lines. The New Yorker noted, "Mr. James Stewart's chauffeur... comes on for three minutes and walks off to a round of spontaneous applause."

The play was a moderate success, but times were hard. Many Broadway theaters had been converted to movie houses and the Depression was reaching bottom. "From 1932 through 1934," Stewart later recalled, "I'd only worked three months. Every play I got into folded." By 1934, he had gotten more substantial stage roles, including the modest hit Page Miss Glory and his first dramatic stage role in Sidney Howard's Yellow Jack, which convinced him to continue his acting career. However, Stewart and Fonda, still roommates, were both struggling.

In the fall of 1934, Fonda's success in The Farmer Takes a Wife took him to Hollywood. Finally, Stewart attracted the interest of MGM scout Bill Grady who saw Stewart on the opening night of Divided by Three, a glittering première with many luminaries in attendance, including Irving Berlin and Moss Hart and Fonda, who had returned to New York for the show. With Fonda's encouragement, Stewart agreed to take a screen test, after which he signed a contract with MGM in April 1935, as a contract player for up to seven years at $350 a week. Upon Stewart's arrival by train in Los Angeles, Fonda greeted him at the station and took him to Fonda's studio-supplied lodging, next door to Greta Garbo. Stewart's first job at the studio was as a participant in screen tests with newly arrived starlets. At first, he had trouble being cast in Hollywood films owing to his gangling looks and shy, humble screen presence. Aside from an unbilled appearance in a Shemp Howard comedy short called Art Trouble in 1934, his first film was the poorly received Spencer Tracy vehicle The Murder Man (1935), but Rose Marie (1936), an adaptation of a popular operetta, was more successful. After mixed success in films, he received his first substantial part in 1936's After the Thin Man, featuring a shocking sequence near the end which showcased his acting ability. On the romantic front, he found himself dating newly divorced Ginger Rogers, whom he had revered while a student at Princeton only a few years earlier. The romance soon cooled, however, and by chance Stewart encountered Margaret Sullavan again. Stewart found his footing in Hollywood thanks largely to Sullavan, who campaigned for Stewart to be her leading man in the 1936 romantic comedy Next Time We Love. She rehearsed extensively with him, having a noticeable effect on his confidence. She encouraged Stewart to feel comfortable with his unique mannerisms and boyish charm and use them naturally as his own style. In the meantime, roommate Fonda continued to arrange parties with starlets, who found Stewart different from the other young actors and irresistible in his own way. Stewart was enjoying Hollywood life and had no regrets about giving up the stage, as he worked six days a week in the MGM factory. In 1936, he acquired big-time agent Leland Hayward, who would eventually marry Sullavan. Hayward started to chart Stewart's career, deciding the best path for him was through loan-outs to other studios.

Pre-war success

In 1938, Stewart had a brief, tumultuous, and well-publicized romance with Hollywood queen Norma Shearer, whose husband, Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, had died two years earlier. Stewart began a successful partnership with director Frank Capra in 1938, when he was loaned out to Columbia Pictures to star in You Can't Take It With You. Frank Capra had been impressed by Stewart's minor role in Navy Blue and Gold (1937). The director had recently completed several popular movies, including It Happened One Night (1934), and was looking for the right actor to suit his needs — other recent actors in Capra's films such as Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, and Gary Cooper did not quite fit. Not only was Stewart just what he was looking for, but Capra also found Stewart understood that prototype intuitively and required very little directing. Later Capra commented, "I think he's probably the best actor who's ever hit the screen."

The heart-warming Depression-era film You Can't Take It With You, starring Capra's "favorite actress", comedienne Jean Arthur, won the 1938 Best Picture Academy Award. The following year saw Stewart work with Capra and Arthur again in the political comedy-drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Stewart replaced intended star Gary Cooper in the film, playing an idealist thrown into the political arena. Upon its October 1939 release, the film garnered critical praise and became a box-office success. Stewart was nominated for the first of five Academy Awards for Best Actor. Even after this great success, Stewart's parents were still trying to talk him into leaving Hollywood and its sinful ways and to return to his home town to lead a decent life. Instead, he took a secret trip to Europe to take a break and returned home in 1939 just as Germany invaded Poland. Destry Rides Again, also released in 1939, became Stewart's first western film, a genre with which he would become identified later in his career. In this western parody, Stewart is a pacifist lawman and Marlene Dietrich is the dancing saloon girl who comes to love him, but doesn't get him. In the film, Dietrich sings her famous song "The Boys In the Back Room". Off-screen, Dietrich did get her man, but the romance was short-lived. Made for Each Other (1939) had Stewart sharing the screen with irrepressible Carole Lombard in a melodrama that garnered good reviews for both stars, but did less well with the public. Newsweek wrote that they were "perfectly cast in the leading roles." Between movies, Stewart began a radio career and became a distinctive voice on the "Lux Radio Theater", "The Screen Guild Theater" and other shows. So well-known had his slow drawl become that comedians started to impersonate him, a form of flattery which continued for most of his life.

In 1940, Stewart and Margaret Sullavan reunited for two films. The first, the Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy, The Shop Around the Corner, starred Stewart and Sullavan as co-workers unknowingly involved in a pen-pal romance who cannot stand each other in real life (this was later remade into the musical, In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson, and later as the romantic comedy You've Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan). It was Stewart's fifth film of the year and that rare film shot in sequence; it was completed in only 27 days. The Mortal Storm, directed by Frank Borzage, was one of the first blatantly anti-Nazi films to be produced in Hollywood and featured the pair as friends and then lovers caught in turmoil upon Hitler's rise to power. Stewart also starred with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in George Cukor's classic The Philadelphia Story (1940). His performance as an intrusive, fast-talking reporter earned him his only Academy Award in a competitive category (Best Actor, 1941), and he beat out his good friend Henry Fonda (The Grapes of Wrath). Stewart thought his performance "entertaining and slick and smooth" but lacking the "guts" of "Mr. Smith." Stewart gave the Oscar statuette to his father, who displayed it for many years in a case inside the front door of his hardware store, alongside other family awards and military medals.

During the months before he began military service, Stewart appeared in a series of screwball comedies with varying levels of success. He followed the mediocre No Time for Comedy (1940) and Come Live with Me (1941) with the Judy Garland musical Ziegfeld Girl and the George Marshall romantic comedy Pot o' Gold. Stewart was drafted in late 1940, a situation that coincided with the lapse in his MGM contract, marking a turning point in Stewart's career, with 28 movies to his credit at that point.

Military service

The Stewart family had deep military roots as both grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, and his father had served during both the Spanish-American War and World War I. Stewart considered his father to be the biggest influence on his life, so it was not surprising that, when another war eventually came, he too was eager to serve. Members of his family had previously been in the infantry, but Stewart chose to become a military flyer.

An early interest in flying led Stewart to gain his Private Pilot certificate in 1935 and Commercial Pilot certificate in 1938. He often flew cross-country to visit his parents in Pennsylvania, navigating by the railroad tracks. Nearly two years before the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Stewart had accumulated over 400 hours of flying time.

Considered a highly proficient pilot, he even entered a cross-country race as a co-pilot in 1939. Stewart, along with musician/composer Hoagy Carmichael, saw the need for trained war pilots, and joined with other Hollywood celebrities to invest in Thunderbird Field, a pilot-training school built and operated by Southwest Airways in Glendale, Arizona. This airfield became part of the United States Army Air Forces training establishment and trained more than 10,000 pilots during World War II, and is now the home of Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Later in 1940, Stewart was drafted into the United States Army but was rejected for failing to meet height and weight requirements for new recruits—Stewart was five pounds (2.3 kg) under the standard. To get up to 148 pounds, he sought out the help Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's muscle man and trainer Don Loomis, who was noted for his ability to add or subtract pounds in his studio gymnasium. Stewart subsequently attempted to enlist in the Army Air Corps, but still came in under the weight requirement, although he persuaded the AAC enlistment officer to run new tests, this time passing the weigh-in, with the result that Stewart enlisted in the Army in March 1941. He became the first major American movie star to wear a military uniform in World War II. Stewart enlisted as a private and then began pilot training in the USAAC. Stewart continued his military training and earned a commission as a second lieutenant in January 1942, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US directly into the conflict. He was posted to Moffett Field and then Mather Field as an instructor pilot in single- and twin-engine aircraft.

Public appearances by Stewart were limited engagements scheduled by the Army Air Forces. "Stewart appeared several times on network radio with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he performed with Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Walter Huston, and Lionel Barrymore in an all-network radio program called We Hold These Truths, dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights." In early 1942, Stewart was asked to appear in a propaganda film to help recruit the anticipated 100,000 airmen that the USAAF would need to win the war. The USAAC's First Motion Picture Unit shot scenes of Lieutenant Stewart in his pilot's flight suit and recorded his voice for narration. The short film, Winning Your Wings, appeared nationwide beginning in late May and was very successful, resulting in 150,000 new recruits.

Stewart was concerned that his expertise and celebrity status would relegate him to instructor duties "behind the lines." His fears were confirmed when he was stationed for six months at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to train bombardiers. He was transferred to Hobbs AAF to become an instructor pilot for the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress, where he trained B-17 pilots for nine months at Gowen Field in Boise, Idaho.

"Still, the war was moving on. For the 36-year-old Stewart, combat duty seemed far away and unreachable and he had no clear plans for the future. But then a rumor that Stewart would be taken off flying status and assigned to making training films or selling bonds called for his immediate and decisive action, because what he dreaded most was the hope-shattering spectre of a dead end." Stewart appealed to his commander, a pre-war aviator, who understood the situation and reassigned him to a unit going overseas.

In August 1943, Stewart was assigned to the 445th Bombardment Group at Sioux City AAB, Iowa, first as operations officer of the 703d Bombardment Squadron and then as its commander, at the rank of captain. In December, the 445th Bombardment Group flew its B-24 Liberator bombers to RAF Tibenham, Norfolk, England and immediately began combat operations. While flying missions over Germany, Stewart was promoted to major. In March 1944, he was transferred as group operations officer to the 453rd Bombardment Group, a new B-24 unit that had been experiencing difficulties. As a means to inspire his new group, Stewart flew as command pilot in the lead B-24 on numerous missions deep into Nazi-occupied Europe. These missions went uncounted at Stewart's orders. His "official" total is listed as 20 and is limited to those with the 445th. In 1944, he twice received the Distinguished Flying Cross for actions in combat and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He also received the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. In July 1944, after flying 20 combat missions, Stewart was made Chief of Staff of the 2nd Combat Bombardment Wing of the Eighth Air Force, and though he was no longer required or expected to fly missions, he continued to do so. Before the war ended, he was promoted to colonel, one of the few Americans to rise from private to colonel in four years.

At the beginning of June 1945, Stewart was the presiding officer of the court-martial of a pilot and navigator who were charged with dereliction of duty when they accidentally bombed the Swiss city of Zurich the previous March—the first instance of U.S. personnel being tried for an attack on a neutral country. The Court acquitted the accused. Stewart continued to play a role in the United States Air Force Reserve after the war, achieving the rank of Brigadier General on July 23, 1959. Stewart did not often talk of his wartime service, perhaps due to his desire to be seen as a regular soldier doing his duty instead of as a celebrity. He did appear on the TV series The World At War to discuss the October 14, 1943, bombing mission to Schweinfurt, which was the center of the German ball-bearing industry. This mission is known in USAF history as Black Thursday due to the high casualties it sustained; 60 aircraft were lost out of 291 B-17s dispatched unescorted to Schweinfurt. The available escort aircraft lacked the range to accompany them. Upon his request, he was identified only as "James Stewart, Squadron Commander" in the documentary.

After the war, Stewart served as Air Force Reserve commander of Dobbins Air Reserve Base in the early 1950s. In 1966, Brigadier General James Stewart flew as a non-duty observer in a B-52 on a bombing mission during the Vietnam War. At the time of his B-52 flight, he refused the release of any publicity regarding his participation, as he did not want it treated as a stunt, but as part of his job as an officer in the Air Force Reserve. After 27 years of service, Stewart retired from the Air Force on May 31, 1968. After his retirement, he was promoted to Major General by President Ronald Reagan.

Post-war success

After the war, Stewart took time off to reassess his career, and he spent much time with his friend Fonda. He was an early investor in Southwest Airways, founded by Leland Hayward, and considered going into the aviation industry if his re-started film career did not prosper. Upon Stewart's return to Hollywood in fall 1945, he decided not to renew his MGM contract. He signed with an MCA talent agency. His former agent Leland Hayward got out of the talent business in 1944 after selling his A-list of stars, including Stewart, to MCA. The move made Stewart one of the first independently contracted actors, and gave him more freedom to choose roles. Stewart was able to work without limits on director and studio availability for the remainder of his career.

For his first film in five years, Stewart appeared in his third and final Frank Capra production, It's a Wonderful Life. Capra paid RKO for the rights to the story and formed his own production company, Liberty Films. The female lead went to Donna Reed, after Capra's perennial first choice, Jean Arthur, was unavailable, and after turn-downs from Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Dvorak and Martha Scott. Stewart appeared as George Bailey, an upstanding small-town man who becomes increasingly frustrated by his ordinary existence and financial troubles. Driven to suicide on Christmas Eve, he is led to reassess his life by Clarence Odbody AS2, an "angel, second class", played by Henry Travers.

After viewing It's a Wonderful Life, President Harry S Truman concluded, "If Bess and I had a son we'd want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart."

Although the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Stewart's third Best Actor nomination, it received mixed reviews and only moderate success at the box office, possibly due to its dark nature. However, in the decades since the film's release, it grew to define Stewart's film persona and is widely considered as a sentimental Christmas film classic and, according to the American Film Institute, one of the best movies ever made.

In the aftermath of the film, Capra's production company went into bankruptcy, while Stewart started to have doubts about his ability to act after his military hiatus. His father kept insisting he come home and marry a local girl. Meanwhile in Hollywood, his generation of actors were fading and a new wave of actors would soon remake the town, including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean.

After a poorly received Magic Town (1947) and the completion of Rope (1948) and Call Northside 777 (1948), Stewart had two flops with On Our Merry Way (1948), an comedic musical ensemble in which Stewart and Henry Fonda played two musicians named "Slim" and "Lank," and You Gotta Stay Happy (1949), for which the posters depicted Stewart being kissed on one cheek by top-billed Joan Fontaine and on the other by a chimpanzee. In the documentary film James Stewart: A Wonderful Life (1987), hosted by Johnny Carson, Stewart said that he went back to Westerns in 1950 in part because a string of films that were flops.

Stewart decided to return to the stage for the Mary Chase-penned comedy, Harvey, which had opened to nearly universal praise in November 1944. Elwood P. Dowd, the protagonist and Stewart's character, is a wealthy eccentric living with his sister and his niece, and whose best friend is an invisible rabbit as large as a man. Dowd's eccentricity, especially the friendship with the rabbit, is ruining the niece's hopes of finding a husband. While trying to have Dowd committed to a sanatorium, his sister is committed herself while the play follows Dowd on an ordinary day in his not-so-ordinary life. Stewart took over the role from Frank Fay and gained an increased Broadway following in the unconventional play. Stewart received his fourth Best Actor nomination for his performance in the film.

After Harvey, the comedic adventure film Malaya (1949) with Spencer Tracy and the conventional but highly successful biographical film The Stratton Story in 1949, Stewart's first pairing with "on-screen wife" June Allyson, his career took another turn. During the 1950s, he expanded into the western and suspense genres, thanks largely to collaborations with directors Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock.

Other notable performances by Stewart during this time include the critically acclaimed 1950 Delmer Daves western Broken Arrow, which featured Stewart as an ex-soldier and Indian agent making peace with the Apache; a troubled clown in the 1952 Best Picture The Greatest Show on Earth; and Stewart's role as Charles Lindbergh in Billy Wilder's 1957 film The Spirit of St. Louis. He also starred in the western radio show The Six Shooter for its one-season run from 1953 to 1954. During this time Stewart wore the same cowboy hat and rode the same horse, named "Pie", in most of his Westerns.

Collaborations with Hitchcock and Mann

James Stewart's collaborations with director Anthony Mann increased Stewart's popularity and sent his career into the realm of the western. Stewart's first appearance in a film directed by Mann came with the 1950 western, Winchester '73. In choosing Mann (after first choice Fritz Lang declined), Stewart cemented a powerful partnership. The film, which became a massive box office hit upon its release, set the pattern for their future collaborations. In it, Stewart is a tough, revengeful sharpshooter, the winner of a prized rifle which is stolen and then passes through many hands, until the showdown between Stewart and his brother (Stephen McNally).

Stewart and Mann also collaborated on other films outside the western genre. 1954's The Glenn Miller Story was critically acclaimed, garnering Stewart a BAFTA Award nomination, and (together with The Spirit of St. Louis) cemented the popularity of Stewart's portrayals of 'American heroes'. Thunder Bay, released the same year, transplanted the plot arc of their western collaborations to a more contemporary setting, with Stewart as a Louisiana oil driller facing corruption. Strategic Air Command, released in 1955, allowed Stewart to use his experiences in the United States Air Force on film.

Stewart's starring role in Winchester '73 was also a turning point in Hollywood. Universal Studios, who wanted Stewart to appear in both that film and Harvey, balked at his $200,000 asking price. Stewart's agent, Lew Wasserman, brokered an alternate deal, in which Stewart would appear in both films for no pay, in exchange for a percentage of the profits and cast and director approval.

This wasn't the first such deal at Universal; Abbott and Costello also had a profit participation contract, but they were no longer top-flight moneymakers by 1950. Stewart ended up earning about $600,000 for Winchester '73 alone. The second collaboration to define Stewart's career in the 1950s was with acclaimed mystery and suspense director Alfred Hitchcock. Like Mann, Hitchcock uncovered new depths to Stewart's acting, showing a protagonist confronting his fears and his repressed desires. Stewart's first movie with Hitchcock was the technologically innovative 1948 film Rope, shot in long "real time" takes. The two collaborated for the second of four times on the 1954 hit Rear Window, one of Hitchcock's masterpieces. Stewart portrays photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, loosely based on Life photographer Robert Capa, who projects his fantasies and fears onto the people he observes out his apartment window while on hiatus due to a broken leg. Jeffries gets into more than he can handle, however, when he believes he has witnessed a salesman (Raymond Burr) commit a murder, and when his glamorous girlfriend (Grace Kelly), at first disdainful of his voyeurism and skeptical about any crime, eventually is drawn in and tries to help solve the mystery. Limited by his wheelchair, Stewart is masterfully led by Hitchcock to react to what his character sees with mostly facial responses. It was a landmark year for Stewart, becoming the highest grossing actor of 1954 and the most popular Hollywood star in the world, displacing John Wayne. Hitchcock and Stewart formed a corporation, Patron Inc., to produce the film, which later became the subject of a Supreme Court case Stewart v. Abend (1990). After starring in Hitchcock's remake of the director's earlier production, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), with co-star Doris Day, Stewart starred, with Kim Novak, in what many consider Hitchcock's most personal film, Vertigo (1958). The movie starred Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia, who develops an obsession with a woman he is shadowing. Scottie's obsession inevitably leads to the destruction of everything he once had and believed in. Though the film is widely considered a classic today, Vertigo met with negative reviews and poor box office receipts upon its release, and marked the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. Stewart was also disappointed. The director blamed the film's failure on Stewart looking too old to still attract audiences, and cast Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest (1959), a role Stewart had very much wanted (Grant was actually four years older than Stewart). Today, Vertigo is ranked second only to Citizen Kane in the 2002 Sight & Sound critics poll for the greatest films ever made.

Career in the 1960s and 1970s

In 1960, James Stewart was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and received his fifth and final Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, for his role in the 1959 Otto Preminger film Anatomy of a Murder. The early courtroom drama starred Stewart as Paul Biegler, the lawyer of a hot-tempered soldier (played by Ben Gazzara) who claims temporary insanity after murdering a tavern owner who raped his wife. The film featured a career-making performance by George C. Scott as the prosecutor. The film was sexually frank for its time (some thought it sordid), and its provocative promotional campaign helped gain it box office success, though Ben-Hur outgrossed all movies by a huge margin and swept the Academy Awards that year. Stewart's nomination was one of seven for the film (Charlton Heston was the winner), and saw his transition into the final decades of his career.

On January 1, 1960, Stewart received the devastating news of the death of Margaret Sullavan (her death was later identified as apparent suicide; the county coroner, however, officially ruled the death an accident). As a friend, mentor, and focus of his early romantic urges, she had a unique influence on Stewart's life. On April 17, 1961, longtime friend Gary Cooper was too ill to attend the 33rd Academy Awards ceremony, so Stewart accepted the honorary Oscar on his behalf. Stewart's emotional speech hinted that something was seriously wrong, and the next day newspapers ran the headline, "Gary Cooper has cancer." One month later, on May 13, 1961, six days after his 60th birthday, Cooper died. In the early 1960s Stewart took leading roles in three John Ford films, his first work with the acclaimed director. The first, Two Rode Together, paired him with Richard Widmark in a Western with thematic echoes of Ford's The Searchers. The next, 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (with John Wayne), is a classic "psychological" western, with Stewart featured as an Eastern attorney who goes against his non-violent principles when he is forced to confront a psychopathic outlaw (played by Lee Marvin) in a small frontier town. At story's end, Stewart's character—now a rising political figure—faces a difficult ethical choice as he attempts to reconcile his actions with his personal integrity. The film's billing is unusual in that Stewart was given top billing over Wayne in the trailers and on the posters but Wayne had top billing in the film itself, a system later repeated by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men. The film garnered mixed reviews but was an instant hit at the box office, and is now ranked as one of Ford's foremost classics. How the West Was Won (which Ford co-directed, though without directing Stewart's scenes) and Cheyenne Autumn were western epics released in 1962 and 1964 respectively. While the Cinerama production How the West Was Won went on to win three Oscars and reaped massive box office figures, Cheyenne Autumn, in which a white-suited Stewart played Wyatt Earp in a long semi-comedic sequence in the middle of the movie, failed domestically and was quickly forgotten. It was Ford's final Western and Stewart's last feature film with Ford. Stewart's entertaining middle sequence is not directly connected with the rest of the film and was often excised in later theatrical exhibition prints and some television broadcasts.

Having played his last romantic lead in 1958's Bell, Book and Candle, and silver-haired (although not all was his—he wore a partial hairpiece starting with "It's a Wonderful Life" and in every film thereafter), Stewart transitioned into more family-related films in the 1960s when he signed a multi-movie deal with 20th Century Fox. These included the successful Henry Koster outing Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), and the less memorable films Take Her, She's Mine (1963) and Dear Brigitte (1965), which featured French model Brigitte Bardot as the object of Stewart's son's mash notes. The Civil War period film Shenandoah (1965) and the western family film The Rare Breed fared better at the box office; the Civil War movie, with strong antiwar and humanitarian themes, was a smash hit in the South.

As an aviator, Stewart was particularly interested in aviation films and had pushed to appear in several in the 1950s; most notably Strategic Air Command and The Spirit of St. Louis. He continued in this vein in the 1960s, most notably in a role as a hard-bitten pilot in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). Subbing for Stewart, famed stunt pilot and air racer Paul Mantz was killed when he crashed the "Tallmantz Phoenix P-1", the specially made, single-engine movie model, in an abortive "touch-and-go". Stewart also narrated the film X-15 in 1961. In 1964, he and several other military aviators, including Curtis LeMay, Paul Tibbets, and Bruce Sundlun were founding directors of the board of Tibbets' Executive Jet Aviation Corporation.

After a progression of lesser western films in the late '60s and early '70s, James Stewart transitioned from cinema to television. In the 1950s he had made guest appearances on the Jack Benny Program (Benny was his real life neighbor and good friend). Stewart first starred in the NBC comedy The Jimmy Stewart Show, on which he played a college professor. He followed it with the CBS mystery Hawkins, in which he played a small town lawyer investigating his cases. The series garnered Stewart a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic TV Series, but failed to gain a wide audience and was cancelled after one season. (Andy Griffith fared much better later in Matlock, based on a similar formula.) During this time, Stewart periodically appeared on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, sharing poems he had written at different times in his life. His poems were later compiled into a short collection titled Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989).

Stewart returned to films after an absence of five years with a major supporting role in John Wayne's final film, The Shootist (1976) where Stewart played a doctor giving Wayne's gunfighter a terminal cancer diagnosis. At one point, both Wayne and Stewart were flubbing their lines repeatedly and Stewart turned to director Don Siegel and said, "You'd better get two better actors". Stewart also appeared in supporting roles in Airport '77, the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and The Magic of Lassie (1978). The latter film received poor reviews and flopped at the box office. Some critics expressed their dismay at seeing the 70-year-old veteran singing as the grandfather. Stewart responded it was the only script he had been offered without any sex, profanity or graphic violence.

Later career and death

Following the failure of The Magic of Lassie, Stewart went into semi-retirement from acting. He donated his papers, films, and other records to Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library in 1983. Stewart had diversified investments including real estate, oil wells, a charter-plane company and membership on major corporate boards. He became a multimillionaire. In the 1980s and 1990s, he did voiceovers for commercials for Campbell's Soups. Stewart's best friend Henry Fonda died in 1982 and his long-time friend Grace Kelly, his favorite female co-star, was killed in a car crash shortly afterwards. A few months later, Stewart starred with Bette Davis in Right of Way, the first made-for-cable movie. He filmed several television movies in the 1980s, including Mr. Krueger's Christmas, which allowed him to fulfill a lifelong dream to conduct the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He made frequent visits to the Reagan White House and traveled on the lecture circuit. The re-release of his Hitchcock films gained Stewart renewed recognition. Rear Window and Vertigo were particularly praised by film critics, which helped bring these pictures to the attention of younger movie-goers. He was presented an Academy Honorary Award by his friend Cary Grant in 1985, "for his 50 years of memorable performances, for his high ideals both on and off the screen, with respect and affection of his colleagues."

Stewart became a real life "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" in 1988, when he made an impassioned plea in Congressional hearings, along with colleagues Burt Lancaster, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and film director Martin Scorsese, against Ted Turner's decision to 'colorize' classic black and white films, including It's a Wonderful Life. Stewart stated, "the coloring of black-and-white films is wrong. It's morally and artistically wrong and these profiteers should leave our film industry alone".

In 1989, Stewart joined Peter F. Paul in founding the American Spirit Foundation to apply entertainment industry resources to developing innovative approaches to public education and to assist the emerging democracy movements in the former Iron Curtain countries. Paul arranged for Stewart, through the offices of President Boris Yeltsin, to send a special print of It's a Wonderful Life, translated by Lomonosov Moscow State University, to Russia as the first American program ever to be broadcast on Russian television. On January 5, 1992, coinciding with the first day of the existence of the democratic Commonwealth of Independent States and Russia, and the first free Russian Orthodox Christmas Day, Russian TV Channel 2 broadcast It's a Wonderful Life to 200 million Russians who celebrated an American holiday tradition with the American people for the first time in Russian history.

In association with politicians and celebrities such as President Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, California Governor George Deukmejian, Bob Hope and Charlton Heston, Stewart worked from 1987 to 1993 on projects that enhanced the public appreciation and understanding of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

In 1991, James Stewart voiced the character of Sheriff Wylie Burp in the movie An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, which was his last film role.

Shortly before his 80th birthday, he was asked how he wanted to be remembered. "As someone who 'believed in hard work and love of country, love of family and love of community.'"

Stewart died from a pulmonary embolism on July 2, 1997, at his home in Beverly Hills. His death came one day after fellow screen legend and The Big Sleep co-star Robert Mitchum had died. Stewart is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

"America lost a national treasure today," President Bill Clinton said on the day Stewart died. "Jimmy Stewart was a great actor, a gentleman and a patriot."

Personal life

James Stewart was almost universally described by his collaborators as a kind, soft-spoken man and a true professional.

Joan Crawford, Stewart's co-star in the early period, praised him as an "endearing perfectionist" with "a droll sense of humor and a shy way of watching you to see if you react to that humor."

When Henry Fonda moved to Hollywood in 1934, he was again a roommate with Stewart in an apartment in Brentwood and the two gained a reputation as playboys. Once married, both men's children noted that their favorite activity when not working seemed to be quietly sharing time together while building and painting model airplanes, a hobby they had taken up in New York, years earlier.

After World War II, Stewart settled down, at age 41, marrying former model Gloria Hatrick McLean (1918–1994) on August 9, 1949. As Stewart loved to recount in self-mockery, "I, I, I pitched the big question to her last night and to my surprise she, she, she said yes!".

Stewart adopted her two sons, Michael and Ronald, and with Gloria he had twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, on May 7, 1951. The couple remained married until her death from lung cancer on February 16, 1994. Ronald McLean was killed in action on June 8, 1969, at the age of 24, while serving as a Marine Corps Lieutenant in Vietnam. Kelly Stewart is an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis.

While visiting India in 1959, Stewart reportedly smuggled the remains of a supposed yeti, the so-called Pangboche Hand, by hiding them in his luggage (specifically, in his wife's underwear) when he flew from India to London, as a favor to Tom Slick.

James Stewart was active in philanthropic affairs over the years. His signature charity event, "The Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon Race", held each year since 1982, has raised millions of dollars for the Child and Family Development Center at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California.

Stewart was a lifelong supporter of Scouting. He was a Second Class Scout when he was a youth, an adult Scout leader, and a recipient of the prestigious Silver Buffalo Award from the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). In later years, he made advertisements for BSA, which led to him sometimes incorrectly being identified as an Eagle Scout. (Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, was also the leader of the "Boy Rangers", a fictional organization patterned after cub scouts.) An award for Boy Scouts, "The James M. Stewart Good Citizenship Award" has been presented since May 17, 2003.

One of Stewart's lesser-known talents was his homespun poetry. He once read a poem that he had written about his dog, entitled "Beau," while on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. By the end of this reading, Carson's eyes were welling with tears. This was later parodied on a late 1980s episode of the NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live, with Dana Carvey as Stewart reciting the poem on Weekend Update and bringing anchor Dennis Miller to tears.

In addition to poetry, Stewart talked during Tonight Show appearances about his avid gardening. Stewart purchased the house next door to his own home at 918 North Roxbury Drive, razed the house, and installed his garden in the lot.

Politics

Stewart was a staunch supporter of the Republican Party and actively campaigned for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He was a "hawk" on the Vietnam War. Following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck issued a statement calling for support of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Gun Control Act of 1968.

One of his best friends was fellow actor Henry Fonda, despite the fact that the two men had very different political ideologies. A political argument in 1947 resulted in a fist fight between them, but the two apparently maintained their friendship by never discussing politics again. There is a brief reference to their political differences in character in their movie The Cheyenne Social Club. In the last years of his life, he donated to the campaign of Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election and to Democratic Florida governor Bob Graham in his successful run for the Senate.

Filmography

From the beginning of James Stewart's career in 1935 through his final theatrical project in 1991, he appeared in 92 films, television programs and shorts. Through the course of this illustrious career, he appeared in many landmark and critically acclaimed films, including such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Rear Window, The Spirit of St. Louis, Vertigo, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. His roles in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Harvey, and Anatomy of a Murder earned him Academy Award nominations (he won for Philadelphia Story). Stewart's career defied the boundaries of genre and trend, and he made his mark in screwball comedies, suspense thrillers, westerns, biographies and family films.

Broadway stage performances

Carry Nation (October–November 1932)

Goodbye Again (December 1932 – July 1933)

Spring in Autumn (October–November 1933)

All Good Americans (December 1933 – January 1934)

Yellow Jack (May 1934)

Divided By Three (October 1934)

Page Miss Glory (November 1934 – March 1935)

A Journey By Night (April 1935)

Harvey (July–August 1947, July–August 1948, replacing vacationing Frank Fay)

Harvey (revival, February–May 1970)

Honors and tributes

James Stewart was presented various kinds of film industry awards, military and civilian medals, honorary degrees, memorials and tributes over the years for his contribution to performing arts, humanitarianism, and military service.

See also

List of film collaborations

References

;Notes ;Citations ;Bibliography

Beaver, Jim. "James Stewart." Films in Review, October 1980.

Brig. Gen. James M. Stewart. "National Museum of the United States Air Force Fact Sheet." National Museum of the United States Air Force''. Retrieved: February 18, 2007.

Coe, Jonathan. James Stewart: Leading Man. London: Bloomsbury, 1994. ISBN 0-7475-1574-3.

Collins, Thomas W. Jr. "Stewart, James." American National Biography Online. "Stewart, James." Retrieved: February 18, 2007.

Cox, Stephen. It's a Wonderful Life: A Memory Book. Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House, 2003. ISBN 1-58182-337-1.

Eliot, Mark. Jimmy Stewart: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2006. ISBN 1-4000-5221-1.

The Jimmy Stewart Museum Home Page. The Jimmy Stewart Museum Home Page, Access date: February 18, 2007.

Fonda, Henry as told to Howard Teichmann. Fonda: My Life. New York: A Signet Book, New American Library, 1981. ISBN 0-451-11858-8.

Houghton, Norris. But Not Forgotten: The Adventure of the University Players. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951.

Jackson, Kenneth T., Karen Markoe and Arnie Markoe. The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives (5). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0-68480-663-0.

Jones, Ken D., Arthur F. McClure and Alfred E. Twomey. The Films of James Stewart. New York: Castle Books, 1970.

McGowan, Helene. James Stewart. London: Bison Group, 1992, ISBN 0-86124-925-9.

Pickard, Roy. Jimmy Stewart: A Life in Film. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0-312-08828-0.

Prendergast, Tom and Sara, eds. "Stewart, James". International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 4th edition. London: St. James Press, 2000. ISBN 1-55862-450-3.

Prendergast, Tom and Sara, eds. "Stewart, James". St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 5th edition. London: St. James Press, 2000. ISBN 1-55862-529-1.

Robbins, Jhan. Everybody's Man: A Biography of Jimmy Stewart. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985. ISBN 0-399-12973-1.

Smith, Starr. Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot. St. Paul, Minnesota: Zenith Press, 2005. ISBN 0-7603-2199-X.

Thomas, Tony. A Wonderful Life: The Films and Career of James Stewart. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1988. ISBN 0-8065-1081-1.

Wayne, Jane Ellen.The Leading Men of MGM. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004. ISBN 0-78671-475-1.

Wright, Stuart J. An Emotional Gauntlet: From Life in Peacetime America to the War in European Skies – A History of 453rd Bomb Group Crews. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. ISBN 0-29920-520-7.

External links

Feaster, Felicia. Turner Classic Movies">James Stewart Profile at Turner Classic Movies

Kronenberg, Harold. Flying with Jimmy Stewart

The New York Times (July 3, 1997)">Obituary: "James Stewart, the Hesitant Hero, Dies at 89," The New York Times (July 3, 1997)

CNN, (July 2, 1997)">Obituary: "Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart dead at 89," CNN, (July 2, 1997)

News: Princeton University (1997)">"Princeton to Honor Famed Alumnus Jimmy Stewart '32 With Tribute and Theater Dedication," Princeton University (1997)

Centennial Tribute to James Stewart

The Jimmy Stewart Museum

National Museum of the United States Air Force">Brig. Gen. James M. Stewart at the National Museum of the United States Air Force

A Kennedy Center Honors: James Stewart

Entertainment Weekly's 100 Greatest Movies of All Time – Entertainment Weekly

Interview at the National Film Theatre in 1972 – British Film Institute

Mr. Stewart Goes to Vietnam, article from Vietnam magazine about Stewart's B-52 mission in 1966

University of Alabama">Images: Stewart Pictures. Telecommunication & Film Department, University of Alabama

Life Magazine (1945)">Images: "Col. James M. Stewart stands with his father outside of the family's hardware store," Life Magazine (1945)

A Wonderful Life: Jimmy Stewart, Actor and B-24 Bomber Pilot

Category:1908 births Category:1997 deaths Category:People from Indiana, Pennsylvania Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:Actors from Pennsylvania Category:American film actors Category:American military personnel of the Vietnam War Category:American Presbyterians Category:American stage actors Category:Best Actor Academy Award winners Category:Best Drama Actor Golden Globe (television) winners Category:Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale) Category:California Republicans Category:Cecil B. DeMille Award Golden Globe winners Category:Recipients of the Croix de Guerre (France) Category:Deaths from pulmonary embolism Category:Disease-related deaths in California Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:20th-century actors Category:Mercersburg Academy alumni Category:People from California Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:Princeton University alumni Category:RCA Victor artists Category:Recipients of the Distinguished Service Medal (United States) Category:Recipients of the Distinguished Flying Cross (United States) Category:Recipients of the Air Medal Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:United States Air Force generals Category:Western (genre) film actors Category:United States Army Air Forces officers Category:United States Army Air Forces pilots of World War II

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Coordinates	23°31′58″N46°47′58″N
name	Harry Cohn
birth date	July 23, 1891
birth place	New York City, New York, U.S.
death date	February 27, 1958
death place	Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.
occupation	Film producer
yearsactive	1919—1958
spouse	Rose Barker (1923-1941)Joan Perry (1941-1958) }}

Harry Cohn (July 23, 1891 – February 27, 1958) was the American president and production director of Columbia Pictures.

Career

Cohn was born to a working-class German-Jewish family in New York City. In later years, he appears to have disparaged his heritage. After working for a time as a streetcar conductor, and then as a promoter for a sheet music printer, he got a job with Universal Pictures, where his brother, Jack Cohn, was already employed. In 1919, Cohn joined with his brother and Joe Brandt to found CBC Film Sales Corporation. The initials officially stood for Cohn, Brandt, and Cohn, but Hollywood wags noted the company's low-budget, low-class efforts and nicknamed CBC "Corned Beef and Cabbage." Harry Cohn managed the company's film production in Hollywood, while his brother managed its finances from New York. The relationship between the two brothers was not always good, and Brandt, finding the partnership stressful, eventually sold his third of the company to Harry Cohn, who took over as president. The firm was now known as Columbia Pictures Corporation.

Most of Columbia's early work was action fare starring rock-jawed leading man Jack Holt. Columbia was unable to shake off its stigma as a Poverty Row studio until 1934, when director Frank Capra's Columbia comedy It Happened One Night swept the Academy Awards. Exhibitors who formerly wouldn't touch Columbia product became steady customers. As a horizontally integrated company that only controlled production and distribution, Columbia had previously been at the mercy of theater owners. Columbia expanded its scope to offer moviegoers a regular program of economically made features, short subjects, serials, travelogues, sports reels, and cartoons. Columbia would release a few "class" productions each year (Lost Horizon, Holiday, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,The Jolson Story, Gilda, All the King's Men, etc.), but depended on its popular "budget" productions to keep the company solvent. During Cohn's tenure, the studio always turned a profit.

Cohn did not build a stable of movie stars like other studios. Instead, he generally signed actors who usually worked for more expensive studios (Wheeler & Woolsey, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Humphrey Bogart, Dorothy Lamour, Mickey Rooney, Chester Morris, Warren William, Warner Baxter, Sabu, Gloria Jean, Margaret O'Brien, etc.) to attract a pre-sold audience. Columbia's own stars generally rose from the ranks of small-part actors and featured players (Rita Hayworth, Larry Parks, Julie Bishop, Lloyd Bridges, Bruce Bennett, Jock Mahoney, etc.). Some of Columbia's producers and directors also graduated from lesser positions as actors, writers, musicians and assistant directors.

Cohn was known for his autocratic and intimidating management style. When he took over as Columbia's president, he remained production chief as well, thus concentrating enormous power in his hands. He respected talent above any personal attribute, but he made sure his employees knew who was boss. Writer Ben Hecht referred to him as "White Fang." An employee of Columbia called him "as absolute a monarch as Hollywood ever knew," and described him as running his studio "like a private police state". It was said "he had listening devices on all sound stages and could tune in any conversation on the set, then boom in over a loudspeaker if he heard anything that displeased him." Throughout his tenure, his most popular moniker was "King Cohn."

Cohn was known to scream and curse at actors and directors in his office all afternoon, and greet them cordially at a dinner party that evening. Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, who worked for Cohn for 23 years, accurately recalled that Cohn was "a real Jekyll-and-Hyde-type guy... socially, he could be very charming." There is some suggestion that Cohn deliberately cultivated his reputation as a tyrant, either to motivate his employees or simply because it increased his control of the studio. Cohn is said to have kept a signed photograph of Benito Mussolini, whom he met in Italy in 1933, on his desk until the beginning of World War II. (Columbia produced the documentary Mussolini Speaks in 1933, narrated by Lowell Thomas.) Cohn also had a number of ties to organized crime. He had a long-standing friendship with Chicago mobster John Roselli, and New Jersey mob boss Abner Zwillman was the source of the loan that allowed Cohn to buy out his partner Brandt. Cohn's brash, loud, intimidating style has become Hollywood legend and rumored to have been portrayed in various movies. The roles played by Broderick Crawford in All The King's Men and Born Yesterday, both Columbia pictures, are supposedly based on Cohn. Also, the character of Jack Woltz, a movie mogul who appeared in The Godfather, is supposedly modeled on Cohn.

In his own way, Harry Cohn was sentimental about certain professional matters. He remembered the valuable contributions of Jack Holt during Columbia's struggling years, and kept him under contract until 1941. Cohn hired the Three Stooges in 1934 and, according to Stooge Larry Fine, "he thought we brought him luck." Cohn kept the Stooges on his payroll until the end of 1957. Cohn was always fond of "those lousy little B pictures" and kept making them, along with two-reel comedies and serials, after other studios had abandoned them; Columbia not shutting down its short subject unit until early 1958. However, he also forced Curly Howard to keep working after suffering a series of minor strokes, which led to a further deterioration of his health and his eventual retirement.

Personal life

Other claims made about Cohn include the rumor that he demanded sex from female stars in exchange for employment, although similar stories were connected to many producers in Hollywood at the time. Harry Cohn's relationship with Rita Hayworth was fraught with aggravation. In Hayworth's biography If This Was Happiness, she described how she refused to sleep with Cohn and how this angered him. However, because Hayworth was such a valuable property Cohn kept her on, making money. For the years they worked together, each did their best to irritate the other despite their lengthy work relationship, which produced good results. At one point Cohn wanted to groom Mary Castle as Hayworth's successor. Kim Novak was another Columbia star who had to endure similar treatment from Cohn. When Joan Crawford became subject to Cohn's advances after signing a three picture contract with Columbia, she quickly stopped him by saying, "keep it in your pants, Harry. I'm having lunch with Joan and the boys (Cohn's wife and children) tomorrow."

Cohn was married to Rose Barker from 1923 to 1941, and to actress Joan Perry (1911–1996) from July 1941 until his death in 1958. Perry later married actor Laurence Harvey. His niece was Leonore "Lee" Cohn Annenberg, the wife of billionaire publishing magnate Walter Annenberg of Philadelphia. Her father was Maxwell Cohn, brother of Harry and Jack Cohn.

Death

Cohn died of a sudden heart attack in February 1958 that he suffered at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, shortly after having finished dinner. He died in an ambulance en route to St. Joseph's Hospital.

Cohn and his funeral were the subject of the famous quote from Red Skelton, who remarked of Cohn's well-attended funeral, "It proves what Harry always said: Give the public what they want and they'll come out for it." Harry Cohn was interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.

References

Bob Thomas, King Cohn

Bernard F. Dick, The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row

Neal Gabler, An Empire Of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

Notes

External links

Category:1891 births Category:1958 deaths Category:American film studio executives Category:American film producers Category:People from New York City Category:Burials at Hollywood Forever Cemetery Category:American people of German-Jewish descent

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