By RAY KELLY
It has been eight years since the publication of Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band, the third in a planned four-book biographical series — and no one is more aware of the passage of time than its acclaimed author, Simon Callow.
Callow is continuing to labor on the book he referred to as Fourth and Final in an interview this week with Wellesnet. It will span the years 1965 through 1985 – the last two decades of Welles’ life.
“I’ve amassed a remarkable amount of very fresh research, which has substantially changed my view of the last 20 years – not least because of my revelatory interviews with Beatrice Welles, the filmmaker’s youngest daughter,” Callow said. “But it remains a very difficult book to write, for obvious reasons.”
Those obvious reasons include the scant completed output of “one of the supreme cinema artists of all time,” said Callow, adding that Welles was at the height of his powers during those two decades.
Following the release of Chimes at Midnight in 1965, Welles completed The Immortal Story for French television in 1968, the film F for Fake in 1973 and the West German television documentary Filming Othello in 1978.
There are two major cinematic projects not completed in Welles’ lifetime: Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind. Callow feels the posthumous assemblies of both, though fascinating, were essentially speculative, and not finally representative of what Welles intended.
“So one has a somewhat ghostly two decades, full of dreams and hopes and plans and fragments and hints,” Callow said. “There are the scripts and there are in some cases the designs, even the production schedules, but writing about Welles of this period is like writing about a medieval composer or painter, of whom everyone speaks but of whose work very little survives.”
In addition to his work as a biographer, Callow is best known for his successful acting career. He is the recipient of an Olivier Award and Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as two BAFTA nominations. He has appeared in such notable films as A Room with a View, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Howards End and Shakespeare in Love. He has taken on three dozen film and television roles since the publication in 2016 of Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band – a biography Publisher’s Weekly lauded at the time as a “genuine gift to film buffs and historians.”
For years, Callow has said he might pen Fourth and Final in the form of a novel.
“That’s unlikely, for the simple reason that I’m not a novelist. But I need to get deep inside Welles’ head. And that is what I’m trying to crack at the moment. I spend hours of the waking day and many of the sleeping night figuring it out. One thing I do know: underpinning this final volume will be Don Quixote, just as Moby Dick underpinned Volume 3,” he said. “I’m very close to putting fingers to keyboard.”
SELECTED WORKS BY SIMON CALLOW
Orson Welles, Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu (1997)
Love Is Where It Falls: The Story of a Passionate Friendship (1999)
Oscar Wilde and His Circle (2000)
Orson Welles, Volume 2: Hello Americans (2006)
Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor (2013)
Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band (2016)
Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived (2018)
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