Director of ‘the greatest film ever made' died alone and broke, was forced to beg for money from his peers: ‘Erratic, self-destructive, egotistical'

Indian Express

24-06-2025

After a decade of self-imposed exile, the great actor-filmmaker Orson Welles attempted to make a comeback. He wanted to make a movie about his old friend, writer Ernest Hemingway's suicide. But no studio wanted to foot the bill. Welles was hailed as a wunderkind after Citizen Kane, often regarded as the greatest movie ever made. But his career was marked by a certain adventurousness that left him struggling financially, off and on, for the vast duration of it. He cobbled together money for his comeback project using foreign financiers (including the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law), but he ran out of funds midway. Accepting a lifetime achievement award in 1975, he made the most of his stage time by essentially asking the august gathering to give him the funds necessary to complete the movie. The industry that once hailed him as a legend, the finest filmmaker to ever exist, discarded him when he had outlived his usefulness.
Welles never directed a successful film during his lifetime, even though many of them are now hailed as classics. Citizen Kane, inarguably his most admired creation, was the number one film of all time according to the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound decennial poll of critics. It was nominated for nine Oscars, winning in the Best Original Screenplay category. Only in his mid-20s and already at the top of the world, he developed a reputation for being a spendthrift.
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Writing for Guardian in 2009, the film historian David Thomson described Welles as 'most glorious film failure of them all.' According to Thomson's essay, Welles 'died, alone and broke, in a cottage in the Hollywood hills on 10 October 1985, at which point his affairs and his estate passed into a chaos that he had known and engineered for most of his life. In his youth, Thomson wrote, Welles 'worked 20 hours a day, ate double meals to keep going, pursued pretty young women like a demon and lived as if he had no tomorrow.'
Welles spoke about his financial struggles in an interview with documentarian Leslie Megahey. 'I think I made, essentially, a mistake staying in movies. But it's the mistake I can't regret because it's like saying I shouldn't have stayed married to that woman, but I did because I love her. I've wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox which is a movie. I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie.'
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In 1982, addressing a group of film students in France, Welles said according to a New Yorker article, 'You are people who have fallen under the spell of the most wicked of all the muses, because it's too expensive.' Asked what the greatest feeling a director can experience is, Welles replied, 'The greatest moment is always when you know the money is in the bank… It's exactly the way you would feel if you were a painter and you had to wait for some fairy to come in the night and give you some paint. Every morning, you wake up and the box is empty. Now, naturally, when you see all those colours in front of you, it's going to be a big moment in your life.'
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Welles reportedly couldn't afford to pay the cinematographer of his final film, and ended up giving him one of his Oscars for Citizen Kane as collateral. To make ends meet, he'd take up acting roles. Famously, he voiced a character in the 1982 animated Transformers film. Once, Welles was hired by director Mel Brooks to narrate some portions of a documentary. He agreed to do it for $25,000. When Brooks asked what he'd spend the money on, Welles replied, 'Cuban cigars and Sevruga caviar. I would have included women, but I'm getting just a little too heavy for that kind of athletic endeavour.'
While being honoured with a lifetime achievement award by the American Film Institute, Welles was reduced to asking his peers for money to complete his unfinished film. 'A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidise my work. In other words, I'm crazy. But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could never have been made otherwise,' he said in his speech. He proceeded to show the crowd a scene from his unfinished film, which revolved around a character needing money.
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Welles died of a heart attack at his Hollywood home at the age of 70 in 1985. As per his wishes, he was cremated. Only a handful of close friends attended his funeral. Joseph Cotten wrote, 'He did not want a funeral; he wanted to be buried quietly in a little place in Spain.' He had been under treatment for diabetes as well as a heart ailment, The New York Times noted in its obituary, adding, 'For his failure to realise his dreams, Welles blamed his critics and the financiers of Hollywood. Others blamed what they described as his erratic, egotistical, self-indulgent and self-destructive temperament. But in the end, few denied his genius.' Writer Stephen Farber noted, 'Looking back over American movie history – a history of wrecked careers – you begin to see that the critics have a lot to answer for. The classic victim is Orson Welles.'