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A book of titanic achievement Daily Telegraph Simon Callow's brilliant account of the early years is the best Welles book yet -- David Hare Callow is not just that rare phenomenon, an actor who can write. He is a superb biographer. His description of the making of Kane is masterly... This is an extraordinary book with extraordinary insights -- Godfrey Hodson Independent A knock-down, brass-bound, copper-bottomed triumph...tremendous fun to read... It is Simon Callow's triumph that at the end of this book Orson Welles comes before us just as Oscar Wilde did at the end of Richard Ellmann's superb biography -- Keith Baxter Daily Telegraph Welles might seem a difficult subject for a new biography. The legend is already pretty much written in stone. Callow's achievement is threefold: he embraces his subject with such gallumphing energy that the extraordinary power of his subject is conveyed as if for the first, fascinating time; he attempts a sober reassessment, trying to get an honest measure of someone who seemed larger than life...and he provides a genuinely interesting actor's view of the actor -- Nigella Lawson The Times

"""A book of titanic achievement"" Daily Telegraph ""Simon Callow's brilliant account of the early years is the best Welles book yet"" -- David Hare ""Callow is not just that rare phenomenon, an actor who can write. He is a superb biographer. His description of the making of Kane is masterly... This is an extraordinary book with extraordinary insights"" -- Godfrey Hodson Independent ""A knock-down, brass-bound, copper-bottomed triumph...tremendous fun to read... It is Simon Callow's triumph that at the end of this book Orson Welles comes before us just as Oscar Wilde did at the end of Richard Ellmann's superb biography"" -- Keith Baxter Daily Telegraph ""Welles might seem a difficult subject for a new biography. The legend is already pretty much written in stone. Callow's achievement is threefold: he embraces his subject with such gallumphing energy that the extraordinary power of his subject is conveyed as if for the first, fascinating time; he attempts a sober reassessment, trying to get an honest measure of someone who seemed larger than life...and he provides a genuinely interesting actor's view of the actor"" -- Nigella Lawson The Times"

A superbly wrought, aesthetically and psychologically acute portrait of Welles's sheer, undisciplined genius. The first of a projected two volumes, this biography takes Welles to the grand old age of 26 (where other talents usually begin their ascent to fame and fortune) and the release of his masterpiece, Citizen Kane. But what seemed like one more triumph in an ever more brilliant and audacious career was really a cresting of the flood, and the years to come, despite occasional squalls of genius, would be a sad, slow ebbing away. As Callow (Charles Laughton, 1988, etc.) notes, Welles had created a body of work in several media that he would never surpass: in the theater, in radio, in book illustration, in film. Welles was an awesomely precocious child. Even when he was a preschooler, most adults who encountered him, from preachers to postmen, felt certain he was destined for greatness. Some of this precocity was certainly due to Welles's ambitious, demanding mother. Her death when he was nine left him with a driving and lifelong sense of guilt and constant need to prove himself. Like its subject, this biography occasionally tends to flabbiness. Callow particularly overdetails Welles's substantial juvenilia (i.e., his accomplishments before he was 17). But rarely, perhaps not since Francois Truffaut's book on Hitchcock, has an arts biographer possessed such a professional and intuitive understanding of his subject. Callow, a British actor (most recently in Four Weddings and a Funeral) and sometime director, offers innumerable hard-won insights into Welles's artistic processes, dissecting them with a careful, revealing hand, guided by his actor's eye for psychological underpinnings. His research is effortlessly vast, and Callow corrects many of the myths and dissemblings surrounding Welles, some of them put out by Welles himself. And this is all accomplished in a highly literate, epigrammatic style that makes this biography a sumptuous pleasure to read. A masterful effort. It will be a hard, fidgety wait for the second volume. (Kirkus Reviews)

A brilliant biography of the young Orson Welles, from his prodigious childhood and youth, his triumphs with the Mercury Theatre, to the making of Citizen Kane. Vivid, vastly entertaining, this is the definitive Welles biography.

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Simon Callow is an actor, director and writer. He has appeared on the stage and in many films, including the hugely popular Four Weddings and a Funeral. His books include Being an Actor, Shooting the Actor, Love is Where it Falls, the first two volumes of his four-volume life of Orson Welles, his theatrical memoir My Life in Pieces, and, most recently, the highly acclaimed Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World.

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