Orson's critics drive me nuts

Critics and audiences have been very good to Rosebud, directed by Josh Richards, and I want to put on record that any passion or energy in my performance as Welles in Mark Jenkins’ play stems from my anger.

Having immersed myself in his life, it infuriates me that the man behind some of the greatest films ever made should have been reduced to this awkward, exiled and in some ways grotesque figure. These at least are the dominant attributes of the image of Welles that I formed in my youth; this gravel-voiced monolith, fatter even than Pavarotti, lending his great gravelly voice to advertisements for frozen peas, sherry and dog food on television.

Faced with this spectacle, who could argue with the conventional wisdom that Welles made a Faustian pact, exchanging his soul and his extraordinary talent for easy lucre.

I hope that Mark’s play is helping to change this erroneous perception. I must have read about 50 books on Welles’s life and only a handful really get the point about him, which was not that he lost his integrity but that he kept it to the end.

If he really was careless of his integrity he would have stayed in Hollywood and jumped through the hoops that the studio bosses demanded. Instead he continued to try and make the kind of films he wanted to make, in reduced circumstances.

The legendary theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay once noted that talent was actually quite common, it’s the character needed to nurture and protect the talent that is so rare. Welles, who made what is usually seen as the greatest film of all time at the age of 24, must be classed in a special group where talent is concerned. But I would argue that he looked after that talent far better than is usually maintained by those who see his career as a long decline from his debut.

Welles’s critics have plenty of ammunition when they claim that he brought about his own fall from grace through self-indulgence. Welles always had a huge appetite and even at the time of Citizen Kane (1941) he was wearing a truss to keep his figure in check. His dressing room was strewn with empty caviar jars and champagne bottles.

It was not just food. Even when he was married to Rita Hayworth, the most beautiful woman in the world at the time, he was having affairs with Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. This is why Falstaff was one of his greatest performances; in food as in sex, he ate life up. Richard Burton, who is a perfect example of a real Faustian figure, looked at him with some gorgeous stick insect and snapped: “How on earth does he make love?”

Certainly Welles was adept at inspiring what must have been considerable kindness from his ladies, but when people start habitually comparing you to a melting iceberg or a volcano, you have a problem being taken seriously as an artist.

There was heartbreaking sadness I think in the image of him wandering the hotel lobbies of the world, instigating thousands of different projects that would never reach fruition.

In the hundreds of hours of film I watched to prepare for the part, the most pathetic was a 1970s television chat show when he sits stoically through a load of fat jokes by his fellow guest Burt Reynolds. Burt Reynolds!

The secret of Welles’s long decline lies not in his deficiencies of character but in his strength of character. At the age of 24, with a string of triumphs in the theatre and radio behind him, he casually decides to make his debut in a complex new medium with a satirical attack on one of the most powerful men in the America. Through a thinly veiled pseudo-biography he makes William Randolph Hearst, the premium American press baron of the day, the butt of an exploration of the corrupting effects of wealth and fame. To make it worse, he personalised the attack by calling the central symbol of the childhood sledge Rosebud, Hearst’s name for his mistress’s clitoris.

Later he would call this the outrage against the American hierarchy “the confidence of youthful ignorance”. If you take on the biggest bully in the playground you have to know what you are doing. Welles began to realise that he had taken on an empire. More to the point the Hollywood studios, to their eternal discredit, yielded to the threats of Hearst and his lieutenants. The Hearst gossip columnist Louella Parsons threatened to expose the Jewish origins of many powerful movie-moguls, making direct and threatening comparisons with the Nazi persecution of Jews in pre-war Germany.

Hearst got his crony Louis B Meyer to make a bid to buy the masters and prints of Citizen Kane for $805,000 so that he could burn them all, ironic given the situation in Europe at the time. Welles’s attack seems to have been more than justified retrospectively.

Kane may have made money eventually, but in Hollywood terms Welles was a marked man from the start. Hearst’s propaganda machine instigated the rumours that Welles was difficult to work with, a myth that easily took hold given Welles’s career-long insistence on control over every aspect of his films. They instigated the myth that he was profligate and generally dangerous in an attempt to destroy his career, and let’s face it, they did.

But the myth that he was a profligate filmmaker simply doesn’t ring true. You can read the budgets for Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons and you can see he brought the films in on time and under budget. Even then Ambersons was prised from his grasp and grotesquely mucked about by the studio, already nervous of the heat from Hearst. They gave it the more conventional saccharine happy note that Welles would never have allowed. Oh, and to make sure that there would never be a “ director’s cut”, the studio chartered a boat and sent the extracted footage to the bottom of the Pacific.

The tragedy of Welles’s career is that mud stuck. Welles found it increasingly difficult to get the budgets for his films, or to get stars of the calibre that would ensure that the films got funded. Even by the time of his last really successful film, Touch of Evil in 1958, nobody was thinking of him as a viable director. He got the job by default when the first choice dropped out, and even then it was only through the intervention of Kirk Douglas.

I realise we are entering more controversial territory when we assert in the play that the films that Welles made before his death in 1985 were potentially great. If only he had been given the money to finish them, we would not think of him as the man who lived his life backwards.

The ones that he did manage to get made show incredibly resourceful use of limited funds, yes from dog food commercials, but so what? There were so many shooting delays that somebody would throw a punch in one part of the world, and the footage of the punch landing would be shot in a different country two years later. To persevere under these conditions takes much more character than Welles is ever given credit for.

The image of Welles that speaks to the truth most clearly, is the account of one of his trusted allies interrupting him sitting “like a Buddha” on the floor in old age, watching the bastardised version of The Magnificent Ambersons being run on television, sobbing like a baby.

Not long after that he died, alone at his typewriter, working on the next day’s script, a beautiful ending, I think. I hope that people who see the play will concede that, if integrity is everything in art, time has shown that Welles had nothing whatsoever to cry about.

Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, Assembly Rooms, until Aug 30 As told to Colin Donald