The actor-manager was an important idea in Orson’s psychology, and in a sense the actor-managers gave him his identity for much of his post-Midwest life, as Orson traveled the globe collecting rag-tag troupes under his own leadership and putting on shows and films. They were heroes to Orson, growing up, and in his youth he was able to meet a few of the last of the breed, such as Sir Ben Greet.

They are mentioned in The Magnificent Ambersons. These actor-managers, who did everything backstage and onstage, led their own traveling troupes across America. One interesting thing about growing up in the Midwest: Orson belonged to a household that worshipped the actor-managers of the era who brought Shakespeare and classical stage plays to the sticks. This anchored him, while at the same time what happened early in his life in Wisconsin and Illinois-Kenosha, Chicago, Madison, Highland Park, Grand Detour, and Woodstock-may have promoted his rootlessness later in life. He came from the middle ground-humbler and more ironic-of Chicago. Welles had a fatal detachment from fame and success as they are celebrated in New York and Hollywood. His Midwestern roots are important to understanding him. I’ve read several books on Welles, and I don’t think any of them stressed, as you did, his midwestern background: “I’m almost belligerently Midwestern,” Welles wrote, “and always a confirmed ‘badger.” Could you elaborate on this? Orson had artistry and integrity to spare. (He also had admirable political integrity, incidentally, and his politics made enemies and affected his career.) Citizen Kane certainly remains inspiring, and one of the best Hollywood examples of artistic integrity in filmmaking. But he had artistic integrity often enough to inspire many stage and screen artists, then and now. He was also at times a “mere” entertainer and breadwinner. Orson Welles was as artistic as possible, when he tried to be, which was not always, of course. Would you cut Tynan some slack on that assessment? In his famous profile of Orson Welles, Kenneth Tynan wrote, “Welles is a self-made man, and how he loves his Maker,” also “One perquisite he lacks: artistic integrity.” That was just a couple of years after Citizen Kane. McGilligan answered these questions for us while on a book and lecture tour in Europe. It is a meticulous recreation of Welles’s life and achievement up to 1941. His latest, Young Orson: The Years and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane, is the most exhaustively researched book yet written on Welles. Among his most popular and controversial subjects are Clint Eastwood ( The Life and Legend), Alfred Hitchcock ( A Life in Darkness and Light), Jack Nicholson ( The Joker Is Wild) and Nicholas Ray ( The Glorious Failure of an American Director).

No one writes biographies of film legends like Patrick McGilligan.

Young Orson by Patrick McGilligan