Orson Welles was twenty-five when he directed and starred in Citizen Kane. That achievement is so extraordinary that it has sometimes made the rest of his life look like a long aftermath. If the first film is regularly called one of the greatest ever made, where can a career possibly go next?
In this biography, we will follow Welles from an unusually theatrical childhood through the Federal Theatre Project, the Mercury Theatre and the radio broadcast that made his name known across America. We will then look at Citizen Kane, the destruction of his preferred version of The Magnificent Ambersons, his years of independent filmmaking and the acting work that paid for it.
We also need to test two familiar stories. The first presents Welles as a genius repeatedly ruined by frightened studios. The second treats him as an irresponsible perfectionist who abandoned one project whenever a more exciting one appeared. Both contain evidence, but neither is enough. Welles could be disciplined, extravagant, practical and impossible, sometimes during the same production.
That contradiction is what makes the career worth following. Creative freedom was not something he possessed for one glorious year and then lost forever. He spent the rest of his life trying to rebuild it in radio studios, European locations, cutting rooms, television appearances and films assembled whenever another acting fee arrived.
Orson Welles with a CBS microphone in 1939, when radio, theatre and national publicity were converging in his career.Orson Welles at a glance
- Full name: George Orson Welles
- Born: 6 May 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin
- Died: 10 October 1985 in Los Angeles, California
- Occupations: Actor, director, writer, producer, theatre director and broadcaster
- Years active: 1931 to 1985
- Best-known films as director: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, Othello, Touch of Evil, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and F for Fake
- Best-known acting for other directors: Jane Eyre, The Third Man, Compulsion and A Man for All Seasons
- Major honours: Academy Award for the Citizen Kane screenplay, an Honorary Academy Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award and a Kennedy Center Honor
A childhood that encouraged the prodigy story
George Orson Welles was born into a prosperous but unsettled family. His mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, was a pianist and active figure in Kenosha’s cultural life. His father, Richard Head Welles, was an inventor and businessman whose interests ranged from tools to hotels. The household gave their younger son access to music, books, machinery and performance unusually early.
Later profiles turned the child into a complete genius almost from birth. Welles encouraged some of that mythology himself because he understood the commercial value of a good entrance. We do not have to accept every story about him reciting Shakespeare in infancy to recognise that adults treated him as exceptional and expected him to perform accordingly.
The security did not last. His parents separated, his mother died when he was nine and his father died when he was fifteen. Physician Maurice Bernstein became his guardian. Welles’s grief and independence consequently developed beside one another, although we should resist the temptation to explain every later conflict through childhood loss.
Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, gave him the most useful kind of freedom. Headmaster Roger Hill allowed Welles to stage, design and act rather than simply demonstrate that he knew the text. The school theatre became a place where lighting, costume, scenery, voice and publicity could be organised as one production. That way of thinking remained with him. Welles rarely treated directing as the management of actors inside a finished visual plan. He wanted to shape the entire event.
Orson Welles as a child in 1926. Later publicity encouraged the prodigy story, although his early life also contained profound loss.Dublin gave him a professional stage
After leaving school, Welles travelled in Ireland and presented himself at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1931. He was sixteen, although he implied that he had considerably more professional experience. Gate founders Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir were not simply fooled by a teenager. They saw a young actor with confidence, a remarkable voice and enough ability to justify the risk.
He made his Gate debut as the Duke in Jew Suss and appeared in other productions before working in London and the United States. The early career moved quickly, but it was not magic. Welles learned inside repertory theatre, where an actor might prepare a new role while performing another one at night. Repertory also taught him that a company could develop a recognisable style without needing a different star for every play.
Back in America, he toured with Katharine Cornell’s company and made his Broadway debut in Romeo and Juliet. Radio work grew alongside the stage career because his voice could suggest age and authority that his face did not yet possess. By his early twenties he had worked in Irish theatre, toured nationally, appeared on Broadway and learned how to perform for a microphone. Hollywood later advertised him as an inexperienced outsider, but that description was useful publicity rather than a fair account of his training.
Federal Theatre turned scale into a habit
Welles began working with producer John Houseman in the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal programme employing theatre professionals during the Depression. Their 1936 production of Macbeth used an all-Black company and moved Shakespeare’s Scotland into a Caribbean setting associated with Haiti. The popular name, the “Voodoo Macbeth”, captures its visual reputation but can also flatten the work of the actors, designers and musicians who created it.
The production made Welles nationally visible as a stage director. It was bold, heavily publicised and open to arguments about cultural borrowing as well as representation. Black performers received roles in a major classical production, while a young white director received much of the historical credit. Both facts belong in the account.
Marc Blitzstein’s labour musical The Cradle Will Rock produced an even more famous confrontation. Federal authorities closed the original theatre shortly before the opening, so the company and audience moved to another venue. Union restrictions prevented the actors from performing conventionally on stage. Blitzstein played the score at a piano while cast members rose from seats around the theatre to deliver their parts.
The evening has become a perfect story about art defeating bureaucracy, and Welles knew how to present it that way. What matters for his later work is the practical lesson. A production did not have to disappear because its expected machinery had been removed. If the stage was unavailable, the auditorium could become the stage.
Welles and Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre in 1937. Their modern-dress Julius Caesar used stark lighting and imagery associated with contemporary fascism. Audiences were not asked to admire a tasteful museum version of Shakespeare. They were asked to recognise political intimidation in their own time.
Anthony Velonis’s poster for the Federal Theatre Project’s 1936 production of Macbeth, directed by Welles with an all-Black company.Radio taught him how to make pictures with sound
Welles’s radio schedule during the late 1930s was astonishing. He acted in dramatic series, narrated programmes, played the title role in The Shadow and directed the Mercury company for radio. The income helped support his theatre work, while the medium gave him a different kind of control.
Radio could move between a room, a crowd and a character’s private memory without building any scenery. Distance could be created by changing the relationship between a voice and a microphone. Music and sound effects could interrupt speech, contradict it or make an event seem to be happening beyond the listener’s view.
These techniques later became important to Citizen Kane. The film’s famous visual design can distract us from how much of its storytelling is carried by overlapping voices, radio-style announcements, sudden changes of acoustic space and dialogue that continues across a cut. Welles did not leave radio behind when he entered films. He brought its freedom with him.
Welles and the Mercury Theatre company during a 1938 CBS radio rehearsal, with actors, musicians and sound work sharing one studio.The War of the Worlds panic was never quite the story
On 30 October 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. After a conventional introduction, parts of the story imitated music programming interrupted by increasingly alarming news reports. Listeners heard an apparently live crisis developing in New Jersey.
Some people certainly became frightened, particularly those who joined after the opening explanation. Police and newspaper offices received calls. However, the familiar picture of an entire nation running into the streets is not supported by the evidence. The programme had a smaller audience than later retellings suggested, and newspapers had their own reason to portray radio as dangerously irresponsible. Broadcasting was taking advertising and attention from print.
The exaggeration suited Welles as well. At the press conference that followed, he appeared apologetic without looking defeated. The twenty-three-year-old director who had been respected in New York theatre became a national celebrity in a weekend.
What made the programme effective was not simply that listeners were gullible. The broadcast borrowed the rhythm and authority of news, then used the gaps between reports to let the imagination enlarge the threat. Welles had demonstrated that the form carrying information could be as important as the information itself.
Welles answers reporters after the War of the Worlds broadcast in October 1938. The later legend of nationwide panic exceeded the surviving evidence.RKO offered an extraordinary Hollywood contract
RKO brought Welles to Hollywood with a contract that gave him unusual authority over writing, production, direction and final approval. He was not handed an unlimited amount of money, as the “blank cheque” description sometimes implies, but the degree of control was remarkable for an untested film director.
His first plans did not become films. A version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was abandoned when its scale made the budget unworkable. An adaptation of The Smiler with the Knife also fell away. These failures matter because they reveal that the struggle between ambition and available resources began before Citizen Kane, not after it.
The project that survived began with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and developed into the life of newspaper proprietor Charles Foster Kane. Welles would direct, produce and play Kane from young adulthood to old age. The Mercury company supplied many of the principal actors, including Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorehead and Ruth Warrick.
Citizen Kane was personal, collaborative and new
Citizen Kane begins with the death of its central character, then asks several people to remember him. Each witness offers a convincing part of Kane, but no account completes the man. The structure makes biography itself the subject. A life cannot be recovered by finding one secret word, one lost love or one authoritative narrator.
Welles and Mankiewicz shared the screenplay credit and the film’s only Academy Award. Arguments over who deserved the greater share became more aggressive decades later. Surviving drafts show substantial work by both men. Mankiewicz brought experience, political anger and material connected to newspaper power. Welles revised, reorganised and directed the script within the production he was building. Giving either man sole authorship turns collaboration into a courtroom verdict it cannot support.
The same principle applies to the film’s style. Cinematographer Gregg Toland did not arrive as a technician waiting to carry out Welles’s inventions. He was an experienced artist who encouraged the young director to attempt difficult staging. Deep-focus photography allowed foreground and background action to remain clear, while low camera positions made ceilings and architecture part of the drama. Those devices existed before Kane. Their importance lies in how Toland and Welles used them with sound, editing and performance.
Bernard Herrmann’s score, Robert Wise’s editing, Perry Ferguson’s design work and the Mercury actors all contributed to the result. Welles supplied the organising appetite. He was exceptionally good at asking what cinema could do, then gathering people capable of finding an answer.
His performance as Kane is sometimes overlooked because the direction attracts so much attention. Young Kane moves quickly, occupies space and treats opposition as entertainment. As the character ages, the voice lowers and the body becomes heavier, but the change is not only makeup. Welles gradually turns confidence into insistence. Kane continues issuing commands after the people around him have stopped believing that command and affection are the same thing.
The breakfast sequence with Ruth Warrick condenses a marriage into a series of short scenes. Costume, distance, newspaper choice and the size of the table perform the work that a conventional film might have spread across an hour. It is clever, but it is not cleverness for its own sake. We understand the marriage because the form has made emotional distance visible.
Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland work beside the camera during Citizen Kane, a film built through unusually close collaboration.Hearst could not stop the film, but he could hurt it
The similarities between Kane and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst were obvious, although Kane also drew on other powerful men. Hearst’s organisation opposed the film, discouraged advertising and placed pressure on exhibitors. The portrayal of singer Susan Alexander was particularly damaging because audiences connected her with Hearst’s companion Marion Davies, a talented comic actor whose career the comparison continues to distort.
RKO released Citizen Kane in 1941 despite the campaign. Reviews were often strong, and the film received nine Academy Award nominations, but it did not recover its costs during the original release. Later revivals, television screenings and critical polls transformed its standing.
The delayed reputation created another trap for Welles. Every later film could be described as a fall from Kane, even when it was attempting something completely different. Few directors have carried a first feature for so long.
The Magnificent Ambersons made the contract collapse
Welles followed Kane with an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons. The story traces the decline of a wealthy Midwestern family as industrial change reshapes the town around them. Welles did not appear on screen, although his narration frames the film.
The surviving version is quieter and more painful than Kane. Rooms fill with people who fail to say what they need, while a changing city presses against the family mansion. Agnes Moorehead, as Fanny Minafer, gives one of the most exposed performances in any Welles film. Her breakdown near the end is difficult to watch because the grandeur surrounding the Amberson name has vanished, leaving humiliation in an almost empty room.
Welles completed a long initial cut before travelling to Brazil for It’s All True, a project connected to the United States government’s wartime Good Neighbor policy. Preview audiences reacted badly to Ambersons, and RKO’s management had changed. While Welles sent instructions from South America, the studio removed more than forty minutes, rearranged material and shot a more reassuring ending. The discarded footage was later destroyed.
This was a genuine act of studio mutilation. We cannot watch Welles’s full version and decide whether every choice worked because the material no longer exists. At the same time, his absence mattered. He had accepted another large assignment before the difficult post-production process was secure, leaving collaborators to negotiate with a studio losing confidence in him.
That does not make RKO’s actions reasonable. It does make the story more complicated than an artist completing a masterpiece and villains cutting it for no reason. Commercial fear, wartime pressure, new management, poor previews, distance and Welles’s own overextension met at the worst possible moment.
Brazil produced another unfinished history
It’s All True was intended to combine documentary and staged material from Latin America. Welles filmed in Brazil, including a recreation of the journey made by four fishermen who had travelled by raft to Rio de Janeiro to demand labour rights. During filming, the fisherman Jacaré died in an accident. RKO withdrew support, and the project remained unfinished.
For years, It’s All True was treated as another exotic Welles failure. Later recovery of footage allowed scholars and filmmakers to reassess the work, while also raising necessary questions about an American production looking at Brazilian lives through wartime cultural diplomacy.
By the time Welles returned, the exceptional RKO arrangement had effectively ended. Citizen Kane, Ambersons and the surviving Brazilian material consequently record not a smooth beginning but three different versions of what institutional freedom might permit.
Acting became the way he bought time
Welles could earn more reliably as an actor than as an independent director. He played Rochester opposite Joan Fontaine in Jane Eyre, a Nazi hiding in small-town America in his own The Stranger and Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man.
Harry Lime is an ideal example of how Welles could dominate a film he did not direct. Characters discuss Lime long before he appears. When a doorway light finally reveals his face, the smile has to answer an hour of rumour. It does. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay and Reed directed; Welles contributed ideas, including the famous speech on the Ferris wheel about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock. His contribution is memorable, but it does not turn The Third Man into an Orson Welles film.
That distinction matters because Welles sometimes encouraged confusion about authorship. He understood that the legend of Welles could increase the value of an appearance. The acting fees then helped fund projects in which his authority was real.
His screen acting changed with the assignment. Rochester is controlled and romantic, Lime charmingly amoral, and corrupt policeman Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil physically oppressive. The voice remains recognisable, but Welles could use that recognition as a promise or a warning.
Rita Hayworth and The Lady from Shanghai
Welles married Rita Hayworth in 1943. Their daughter Rebecca was born in 1944. The marriage united a director already surrounded by controversy with one of Hollywood’s most photographed stars, so private events quickly became public property.
They were separated while making The Lady from Shanghai and divorced in 1947. Welles cast Hayworth as Elsa Bannister, cut her famous red hair short and dyed it blonde. The transformation has sometimes been described as an act of hostility towards Columbia’s star image. It also serves the film, which asks every character to perform a version of innocence while preparing betrayal.
Welles plays Irish sailor Michael O’Hara with an accent that comes and goes, something the film never quite persuades us to ignore. Hayworth is more controlled. Elsa’s stillness makes Michael’s certainty look increasingly foolish.
Columbia delayed the release and cut Welles’s version. The surviving film can feel uneven, but its aquarium scene, courtroom grotesques and hall-of-mirrors climax contain some of his sharpest visual ideas. In the mirrors, characters fire at reflections until the glamorous images literally shatter around them. It is an obvious metaphor, and Welles makes the obviousness thrilling.
A poster for The Lady from Shanghai, the visually daring film Welles made with Rita Hayworth during the breakdown of their marriage.Othello turned shortage into a method
After making a low-budget Macbeth for Republic Pictures, Welles began Othello. Financing repeatedly collapsed, so filming stopped and restarted across several years and countries. He took acting jobs, returned with money and gathered whichever performers and locations were available.
The production difficulties forced invention. A costume shortage could become a sequence in a bathhouse. Locations filmed months apart could be joined through rapid editing, stone walls and tightly framed faces. Instead of pretending the world was seamless, the film turns fragmentation into the atmosphere of jealousy.
Welles plays Othello as a man whose public command cannot protect his private imagination. Suzanne Cloutier’s Desdemona appears inside a world already narrowed by suspicion, while Micheál Mac Liammóir gives Iago a watchful intelligence rather than theatrical wickedness.
The completed film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952, entered under Morocco because it lacked a conventional national backing. That triumph did not solve its distribution problems. Different soundtracks and versions circulated, and later restoration work created further debate about how an unstable independent film should be preserved.
Othello is important because it rejects the idea that Welles could create only when a studio supplied everything. He could also build a film out of interruption. The cost was time, uncertainty and financial dependence on the next job.
Welles as Othello with Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona. The production continued across interrupted shoots and changing locations.Touch of Evil came with a 58-page argument
Universal initially hired Welles to act in Touch of Evil (1958). He also became its director, working with Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich on a crime story set along the US-Mexico border. Welles plays police captain Hank Quinlan, whose instinct for guilt has become an excuse to manufacture evidence.
The opening shot follows a bomb through crowded streets and across the border before it explodes. Its technical confidence is famous, although the studio added credits and music over the sequence in the released version. The rest of the film is just as interested in movement, with characters crossing jurisdictions while Quinlan behaves as if his authority should have no border at all.
Universal removed Welles from the final editing and arranged additional shooting. After seeing a studio version, he wrote a detailed memorandum suggesting changes. The document ran to fifty-eight pages. It is valuable because it records precise intentions rather than a later claim that everything wrong belonged to somebody else.
A 1998 reconstruction used the memo as a guide. We should not call it a definitive director’s cut because Welles was not there to approve it and the editors had to make decisions the memo could not settle. It does, however, bring the film closer to many of his recorded requests.
The casting requires modern attention. Heston plays a Mexican prosecutor in brownface, and the border setting is constructed through Hollywood stereotypes. Welles’s attack on corrupt policing remains powerful, but formal brilliance does not remove the racial history of the production.
Chimes at Midnight brought the theatre and films together
Welles spent decades thinking about Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Chimes at Midnight (1965) combines material from several plays to place the large, boastful knight at the centre of Prince Hal’s movement towards kingship. Welles plays Falstaff as comic invention and emotional need. The performance is enormous because Falstaff uses excess to keep age, poverty and rejection outside the room.
The Battle of Shrewsbury sequence turns medieval combat into mud, metal, frightened bodies and confused editing. It does not offer the clean geography of heroic spectacle. Men collide, fall and disappear beneath armour. Welles could stage scale, but here scale makes glory look absurd.
The quieter scenes explain why the battle matters. Falstaff imagines that Hal’s affection will survive political necessity. When the new king rejects him, Welles does not ask for a tidy tragic close-up. The old man tries to turn the humiliation into another story until the story will no longer hold.
Poor distribution and rights problems kept the film difficult to see for years. Its later restoration and wider circulation have made it easier to recognise as one of his central works, not an eccentric Shakespearean detour.
F for Fake let him edit his own legend
F for Fake (1973) begins with art forger Elmyr de Hory and writer Clifford Irving, then expands into a playful argument about experts, authenticity, editing and Welles himself. He appears in a cape and broad-brimmed hat, looking exactly like the public idea of a magician.
The film invites us to enjoy that image while warning us not to trust it. Welles rearranges documentary footage, repeats gestures, changes context and eventually tells a story whose terms he has carefully limited. Editing becomes a confidence trick performed in full view.
This late style is lighter than the solemn “failed genius” label suggests. Welles could be funny about authorship because he had spent a lifetime watching critics search for the single person responsible for a film. F for Fake responds that authorship is real, collaboration is real and deception may be present in the way either story is sold.
Welles as the corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, a studio assignment transformed by his direction and performance.The unfinished films were part of the working method
Welles left many projects incomplete. Don Quixote continued across years without reaching an authorised final form. The Deep was largely filmed but not finished. The Other Side of the Wind, begun in 1970, used changing film formats to portray an ageing director and the younger observers circling his final production.
It would be sentimental to call every unfinished project a lost masterpiece. Some lacked essential footage, sound or a stable plan. Welles often revised the idea while shooting and could treat completion as less exciting than possibility. Investors and collaborators carried the cost of that instability.
It would be equally unfair to dismiss the material as a collection of abandoned hobbies. Financing an independent feature through acting, narration and commercial appearances is slow. Legal disputes and ownership divisions made access harder. Welles continued editing whenever money and materials permitted.
After his death, a team completed The Other Side of the Wind from the surviving footage and production records, releasing it in 2018. The result is not the same as a version finished by Welles, but it allows us to see how actively he was responding to New Hollywood rather than living entirely inside memories of 1941.
Was Welles defeated by Hollywood or defeated by himself?
This is the wrong choice, even if it produces an attractive headline. Studios removed or altered important work. The missing Ambersons footage cannot be blamed on Welles’s personality. Universal’s handling of Touch of Evil is documented in the memo he wrote at the time.
Welles also made decisions that increased risk. He moved between projects, spent beyond secure financing, began films without knowing how they would be completed and sometimes allowed the story of interference to hide practical failures. Collaborators could admire him and still be exhausted by him.
The better question is what kind of system his work required. Welles wanted the scale and skilled labour of a studio, the flexibility of a theatre company and the personal authority of an independent artist. Hollywood could offer any two of those more easily than all three.
He consequently built temporary systems around each film. Sometimes RKO, Universal or a European producer supplied the structure. Sometimes an acting fee did. The films do not record one continuous defeat. They record repeated negotiations between freedom and completion.
Which Orson Welles films should you watch first?
We would not recommend watching the films strictly in release order. A route through the different kinds of control makes the career easier to understand.
- Citizen Kane (1941): Begin with the famous film, but pay as much attention to performance, sound and collaboration as to the camera angles.
- The Magnificent Ambersons (1942): Watch the surviving version next. Its emotional quietness immediately challenges the idea that Welles could direct only through display.
- The Third Man (1949): This shows how an actor can dominate a film without becoming its director or author.
- Othello (1952): The years of interrupted production demonstrate how financial shortage changed his visual method.
- Touch of Evil (1958): Use the 1998 reconstruction if available, while remembering that it follows a memo rather than presenting a final cut approved by Welles.
- Chimes at Midnight (1965): The Falstaff film joins his theatre training, acting, editing and lifelong interest in betrayal.
- F for Fake (1973): Finish with the wit. It makes the legend of Orson Welles part of the material under examination.
After those seven, try The Lady from Shanghai, The Trial and The Other Side of the Wind. Our Rita Hayworth biography provides useful context for The Lady from Shanghai. A future classic Hollywood actors guide could be linked here after that draft is published.
Citizen Kane, radio and the battle for creative freedom
Orson Welles did not spend forty-four years trying to make Citizen Kane again. He spent them testing whether the freedom behind it could be recreated under different conditions. Radio gave him control over sound. Theatre gave him a company and a live audience. RKO briefly added studio resources. European production later replaced security with mobility.
The results are uneven because the conditions were uneven and because Welles himself preferred risk to repetition. Yet the best later films are not merely fragments left after Hollywood finished with him. Othello, Chimes at Midnight and F for Fake exist because he found new forms for the resources available.
If Citizen Kane is the only film you know, watch Chimes at Midnight next. The young director’s confidence is still present, but age has changed the subject. The film understands that power may require a man to reject the person who helped him imagine freedom. Welles knew both sides of that bargain.
Questions readers often ask
How old was Orson Welles when he made Citizen Kane?
Welles was twenty-five during the principal production and twenty-six when the film received its general release in 1941. He had already spent years directing theatre and radio before making his first feature.
Did Orson Welles write Citizen Kane by himself?
No. Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz shared the screenplay credit and the Academy Award. Surviving drafts support substantial contributions by both writers, while the completed film also depended on collaborators including Gregg Toland, Bernard Herrmann and Robert Wise.
Did The War of the Worlds cause nationwide panic?
No. Some listeners were frightened and authorities received calls, but later research has shown that the audience and reaction were much smaller than the familiar nationwide-panic story suggests. Newspapers helped enlarge the event while competing with radio for advertising and influence.
Why was The Magnificent Ambersons cut?
RKO reacted to poor preview responses while Welles was working in Brazil. The studio removed more than forty minutes, rearranged the film and shot a different ending. Management changes, wartime pressures and Welles’s absence all formed part of the circumstances, but the decision to destroy the removed material belonged to the studio.
Which Orson Welles film won an Oscar?
Citizen Kane won the Academy Award for its screenplay, credited to Welles and Mankiewicz. Welles later received an Honorary Academy Award recognising his contribution to cinema.
What was Orson Welles’s final completed film?
His last feature released during his lifetime as director was the documentary Filming Othello (1978). He continued working on other projects until his death. The Other Side of the Wind was assembled and released by a later team in 2018.