Suzanne flon orson welles biography simon callow

When Simon Callow set out to write a biography of Welles, he thought it might take four years. I understood from the beginning, though I had just one medium-sized, single-volume biography of Charles Laughton under my belt, that any account of Orson Welles would have to be big. His life was so complex, his achievements so multifarious, his personality so unfathomable, the myths so pervasive, that I was sure that if I was to understand him I would have to cast my net very wide, at the same time as going deep down under the surface; one volume, I knew, could never do him justice.

Multi-volume biographies are by no means encouraged in the trade.

Biographies of Leaming, Higham, and

When Nick Hern, who initially commissioned the book, and I went to see the much-admired American publisher Aaron Asher, I told him I wanted to write it in three volumes. The first, I said, would end with Citizen Kane , the second with Chimes at Midnight , and the third, dealing with his unfulfilled last two decades, would be a novel.

The great man looked at me pityingly. I accepted his wisdom and set to: volume one up to Kane ; volume two the rest. That was the summer of Welles had only been dead four years, I had just turned I was determined that, unlike the Laughton book — for which I had simply seen all the films, read all the available published sources and interviewed a few easily accessible people — the Welles biography would be a work of serious scholarship.

It was originally planned to be an account of his extraordinary and little-known work in the theatre. Tearing through my modest advance in a matter of weeks, I crossed the US plundering archives, libraries and museums, obsessively photocopying and microfiching, peering at blurred and fuzzy documents which took long and painful months to decipher; I went through the European collections, I tracked down obscure doctoral theses, again painstakingly photocopied — no internet, no email, back then, of course.

Across two continents I interviewed everybody who had ever worked with him in the theatre — actors, writers, producers, designers, lighting designers, understudies, stage managers, secretaries. This proved to be an emotional business.