Wellesnet is co-sponsoring Chris Welles Feder’s first appearance for her intimate new book about Orson Welles, In My Father’s Shadow at the Rafael Theatre, in San Rafael on Monday November 2.
Ms. Welles-Feder has long been a supporter of Wellesnet and we do return those duties back to her as are right fit…
The book is getting sensational reviews, and below you can read just a small sampling of them.
But best of all, Wellesnet will have an exclusive interview with Chris Welles Feder about her book after we talk to her on Monday afternoon…
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The first memoir on Orson Welles by a member of his family, Chris Welles Feder’s beautifully written book offers a fresh and insightful look at her loving but maddeningly elusive father, revealing the great filmmaker as we’ve never seen him before. Along with its compassionate, clear-eyed, and often surprising portrait of Welles in his most vulnerable moments, the book offers us a poignant self-portrait of a bright, lively girl struggling to find hers inner self as the neglected daughter of a famous man. Her triumphant journey to independence and her posthumous reconciliation with her father’s memory is the missing chapter in the story of Orson Welles, one only his first-born daughter can tell with such authority, grace, and wisdom.
–JOSEPH McBRIDE
You can read Mr. McBride’s entire insightful review of Chris Welles book at BRIGHT LIGHTS Film JournalHERE.
*
Chris Welles Feder has come out of her father’s shadow to write an intimate, candid, yet very loving, very personal portrait of the loving, complicated, contradictory, mercurial and surprisingly brilliant man as she knew him. This is an Orson Welles we have never seen before–a warm, touching, occasionally bewildering side a multi-sided genius. That he was certainly not an ideal parent or husband in no way minimizes the good he gave to his child or how enriched she was by his precious time with him. Chris has shared all of this with us in a beautifully written and moving memoir which should have a most special place in the extraordinary world of Orson Welles.
–PETER BOGDANOVICH
*
Chris Welles Feder paints a beautifully personal memoir/biography that stars herself as much as her father. In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles (Algonquin. $24.95) is a portrait of the cigar-smoking, work-obsessed, well-intentioned but absent father as well as an exploration of a young girl’s admiration and understanding (or misunderstanding) of family dynamics and love. Feder’s narrative is one no detached biographer could fashion, and her perspective feels essential.
—ANNA KATTERJOHN, Library Journal.
*
Feder, the daughter of Orson Welles and his first wife, Virginia, tells the story of her search for a relationship with her famous father as well as creating an independent identity through a childhood and adolescence influenced by a list of affectionate guardians and brilliant but dysfunctional grownups. The latter category included her own parents: the author was still a child when they separated and her father married Rita Hayworth; her mother, meanwhile, went on to her own second and third marriages. Feder found affection at times, but it was her years in Illinois with her father’s former headmaster and the headmaster’s wife that provided her first experience of domestic stability. Her peripatetic life resumed, however, while her father arrived irregularly for extended one-on-one visits that shaped his daughter’s budding intellect, but left her hungry for a deeper, more permanent connection. Her story conveys a powerful, intimate sense of Welles’s creative struggles and her own part in preserving his artistic legacy.
—Publisher’s Weekly
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Excerpt from Orson Welles final unfilmed script for KING LEAR:
CORDELIA: You have begot me, bred me, loved me.
I return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honor you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
*****