Young Orson

October 5, 2015
Orson Welles, America’s storied show-biz boy wonder, appears to the manor born in this engrossing biography. Film historian McGilligan (Nicholas Ray) follows Welles from his Illinois boarding-school productions (which even then drew press interest) to his professional debut at age 16 in Dublin, playing roles twice his age. New York directing coups followed, including his all-black Macbeth and Fascist-themed Julius Caesar. His radio play of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds induced panic. His movie Citizen Kane, hailed by many critics as the greatest film ever, was made when he was just 25. This is a book about families, with rich profiles of Welles’s affluent, indulgent parents; a series of father figures who mentored him, promoted him, and lent him money; and his close-knit acting ensemble at the Mercury Theater, where he played the paternal, tyrannical head of the household. It’s also a fine evocation of Welles’s innate charisma, concocted from a grand physical presence, godlike voice, Falstaffian magnetism, and uncanny precocious insight into character and dramatic effect. Exhaustively researched but well-paced and stuffed with beguiling detail, this is a vivid, sympathetic portrait of Welles’s youthful promise and achievement, before the misfires and compromises of his later years. B&w photos.

October 1, 2015
A boy wonder's life]overlong but also filling.Few directors in film history have generated more biographies than Orson Welles (1915-1985), and anyone tackling the job anew better have a fresh angle or something new to report. Veteran film scribe McGilligan (Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director, 2011, etc.) meets this challenge by focusing exclusively on Welles' early years, but his success is mixed. When he's not leaning heavily on the work of his many predecessors]mainly Barbara Leaming, as well as Peter Bogdanovich, Simon Callow, and Frank Brady]as well as the bitter memoirs of Welles' former friend John Houseman, he's expanding heavily on stories they either succinctly boiled down or scraps they left behind, from Welles' youthful poetry to day-by-day accounts of his international trips to microscopic rehashings of minor scuffles. While the book is needlessly long, McGilligan does illuminate the full scope of a truly charmed youth, and he reminds us that while it may be unfair to say that Welles peaked early, there were definitely a lot of peaks, even before he triumphed as the 25-year-old whiz behind Citizen Kane. The pampered son of an alcoholic businessman and a progressive socialite, he was raised to be a genius, and he didn't disappoint. He was only 20 when he staged a revolutionary all-black Macbeth for the Federal Theater ("The great success of my life," he called it), followed up by a modern-dress Julius Caesar and more theater successes, making the cover of Time even before he cooked up the idea of a live-radio Martian landing. Then it was on to Kane, which the author pieces together in generous detail, with specific attention to the much-debated relationship between Welles and co-scenarist Herman Mankiewicz. McGilligan works overtime trying to justify such a massive book about only a part of Welles' life, but it's also buoyed by a dependably powerful subject at the center.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 15, 2015

As 2015 marks the centenary of the birth of Orson Welles, a number of recent books have covered this legendary filmmaker. The latest is a massive tome devoted to perhaps the least chronicled aspect of his career: his rise. Welles, post-Citizen Kane, has been studied by countless scholars, but McGilligan, biographer of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, provides a much-needed view of his subject's early days in school, theater, and radio. The author conducted extensive research to extract the truth of Welles's origins from the myths and legends spun by the man himself. Actor and writer Simon Callow tackled this same period in 1996's Road to Xanadu, the first in his four-part biography of Welles. Yet as excellent as that work remains, McGilligan's possesses a more inviting style, imparting just as much insight as Callow's book but without feeling as academic. VERDICT Welles's native brilliance and his ascent from producing plays as a boy at the Todd School to his conquest of New York theater and radio as an adult has seldom been documented with more clarity. [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]--Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2015
This is the centennial year of Orson Welles' birth. Biographies (and there have been several) necessarily confront whether the filmmaker had a Rosebud, a single word or incident that could explain his life. In his collaboration with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles denied, not necessarily credibly, that there was one. But, as prolific film historian McGilligan effectively demonstrates here, Welles' mother's theatricality and early death explain a lot, as does his older brother's institutionalization and his father's alcoholism. The young Wellesthe focus of this immense bookwas already an extraordinary talent: in theater (in Ireland and America), in radio, and then film, but also as a painter and writer. McGilligan recounts Welles' work with John Houseman on the WPA Voodoo Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock as well as their Mercury Theatre productions, and Welles' active life is so packed with worthy and successful projects that the reader is stunned by how really young young Orson is at various stages of his incredible early career. He was 23 years old when his (and writer Howard Koch's) radio play of The War of the Worlds startled America. After incorporating film into some of his theatrical productions, but without other movie experience, Welles was offered by RKO in 1939 the greatest railroad train a boy ever had. After aborting an attempt to do a film version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Welles (and Herman Mankiewicz and Houseman) commenced work on Citizen Kane, which McGilligan analyzes in great depth, including long-controversial issues of authorship. In terms of the subtitle, McGilligan emphasizes genius over luck, and when, 750 pages later, Welles has his twenty-sixth birthday, the reader is well inclined to agree. Must reading for anyone interested in the history of film.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)