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  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446483565
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 688

Orson Welles, Volume 1

The Road to Xanadu




Insightful, incisive & enlightening, the first volume of Simon Callow's comprehensive biography of Orson Welles

A brilliant biography of the young Orson Welles, from his prodigious childhood and youth, his triumphs with the Mercury Theatre, to the making of Citizen Kane. Vivid, vastly entertaining, this is the definitive Welles biography.

  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446483565
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 688

About the author

Simon Callow

Simon Callow is an actor, director and writer. He has appeared on the stage and in many films, including the hugely popular Four Weddings and a Funeral. His books include Being an Actor, Shooting the Actor, Love is Where it Falls, the first two volumes of his four-volume life of Orson Welles, his theatrical memoir My Life in Pieces, and, most recently, the highly acclaimed Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World.

Also by Simon Callow

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Praise for Orson Welles, Volume 1

A book of titanic achievement

Daily Telegraph

A knock-down, brass-bound, copper-bottomed triumph...tremendous fun to read... It is Simon Callow's triumph that at the end of this book Orson Welles comes before us just as Oscar Wilde did at the end of Richard Ellmann's superb biography

Keith Baxter, Daily Telegraph

Callow is not just that rare phenomenon, an actor who can write. He is a superb biographer. His description of the making of Kane is masterly... This is an extraordinary book with extraordinary insights

Godfrey Hodson, Independent

Simon Callow's brilliant account of the early years is the best Welles book yet

David Hare

Welles might seem a difficult subject for a new biography. The legend is already pretty much written in stone. Callow's achievement is threefold: he embraces his subject with such gallumphing energy that the extraordinary power of his subject is conveyed as if for the first, fascinating time; he attempts a sober reassessment, trying to get an honest measure of someone who seemed larger than life...and he provides a genuinely interesting actor's view of the actor

Nigella Lawson, The Times