Citizen Welles

A decade in the research and writing, biographer Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles is the first comprehensive life story, definitive for our time, of Orson Welles through to his death in 1985. Welles’s influence on several generations of American filmmakers, from Kubrick to Spielberg, for example, is incalculable. Welles’s creative achievements, from the best known — his all-time great movie Citizen Kane and his notorious radio show The War of the Worlds — to his pioneering presentations in the popular theater of the classics of Shakespeare, Shaw, Ionesco, and his stardom as an actor are at the heart of Brady’s biography.

But Brady tells, too, the more personal side of Welle’s life, such as his amours with Rita Hayworth and Dolores Del Rio and the confounding tragedy of Welles’s sad final years, in part, Brady shows, the consequences of tee early success. The young Welles toured with Katherine Cornell; starred on Broadway in Shaw’s Heartbreak House, when he made the cover of Time; acted in Hamlet in the Gate Theatre in Dublin. His films such as The Magnificent Ambersons, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight (his Falstaff may well be the greatest of all Falstaffs) were among the best of all time.

Brady clarifies the whys and wherefores of Welles’s extraordinary success and his end, when Welles was uniformly rejected by Hollywood as a noncommercial iconoclast. The great continuing popular interest in posthumous Orson Welles is vivid evidence of the shortsightedness of that view.

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“Brady encircles his outsize subject with equal parts of anecdote and scholarship. He does not attempt the intimate tone of Barbara Leaming’s authorized 1983 biography or try for the high-skid fashion of Charles Higham’s Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (1985). Citizen Welles covers more ground and digs deeper, revealing an artistic nomad whose life had too many ups, downs and lateral movements to be treated as a sales chart.”
Time Magazine

“Citizen Welles may well be definitive.”
The New York Times Book Review

“Brady’s quiet but unrelenting passion for his subject pulsates beneath his variegated and vastly human portrait of stage, radio and film genius Orson Welles.”
Publishers Weekly

“Orson Welles has been called a genius so often it seems like his middle name. But Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles is the first book in the huge Welles bibliography to thoroughly document that claim.”
Playboy

“An excellent piece of work.”
Charlton Heston

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Frank Brady is the author of ten books, including five biographies delving into the lives of such fascinating subjects as shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, singer-actress Barbra Streisand, newspaper tycoon Paul Block, chess champion Bobby Fischer, and movie director and actor Orson Welles. All of Dr. Brady’s works have been published by distinguished houses (Scribners, Macmillan, Grosset & Dunlap, Crown, etc.) and all have also been published in paperback, and translated and published in several countries. Some of his books have been optioned for the screen and others have been book club selections.

His biography of Bobby Fischer, Endgame, became a New York Times bestseller and has been published in eleven countries. Dr. Brady has also been involved in broadcasting as a behind-the-scenes and on-air personality for both radio and television.

A New Yorker by birth, Dr. Brady lives in Manhattan and is a professor of the Communications, Journalism and Media Studies Department of St. John’s University. He studied at Columbia University and New York University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in communications. His wife, Maxine, is an editor and also a best-selling author.