Book Review – Orson Welles, Volume 3: One Man Band by Simon Callow

Hardback by Jonathan Cape,  £25 (ebook £12.99)

The third volume of Simon Callow’s titanic Orson Welles biography traces Welles’ life from Macbeth’s frosty reception in 1948 to his crowning glory of a noble failure, Chimes At Midnight, two decades later. Welles left a daunting number of loose threads across as many mediums and continents as he could find, but Callow has a suitably kitchen sink approach, sources of staggering breadth and detail revealing a brilliant, sad, divisive figure: a boyish genius in constant search of Hollywood’s approval.

Eventually the urge to hurl advice at the pages (don’t take a film crew to Mexico on tourist visas!) subsides and we appreciate the genuine highs – especially Moby Dick, its production and whirlwind performance thrillingly conveyed – and suffer the myriad lows, project after project abandoned through problems of finance, personality, or the inescapable fact that there was only one Orson Welles.

A biography as exhaustive and exhilarating as its subject.