Updated on June 9 with video of unveiling at end of post.
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A bronze sculpture of Orson Welles will be dedicated on Friday, June 8, at 6:30 p.m. in the late actor-director’s adopted hometown of Woodstock, Illinois.
It will be placed near a 118-foot long mural, located along the Main Street Pedway adjacent to Classic Cinemas Woodstock Theatre. The colorful mural honors Welles and other hometown heroes.
Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but educated at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock. He later lived in New York, Hollywood, London, Madrid, Las Vegas and other several other cities around the globe.
Asked about where he considered home, Welles once remarked, “I have lots of homes … I suppose it’s Woodstock, Illinois, if it’s anywhere. I went to school there for four years, and if I think of home, it’s there.”
The public is invited attend the dedication and “welcome Orson back home.”
The sculpture was created and donated by artist Bobby Joe Scribner, 60, who moved to Woodstock 15 years ago.
Scribner, who teaches figure modeling at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, had to rely on photographs and videos of Welles to capture his likeness.
He chose to depict Welles during the 1960, teeling Wellesnet, “I wanted him to be recognizable to most people as he looked later in life with the beard. But I wanted him vigorous, so I went with early middle age.”
The nearby mural features four of Woodstock’s cultural legends: Welles, Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould, the 1993 movie Groundhog Day; and stars of the Woodstock Opera House. Gould lived in Woodstock during the final 50 years of his life and is buried there. The romantic comedy Groundhog Day with Bill Murray was filmed in Woodstock and the Opera House is a local landmark with a rich history.
The mural panel depicting Welles features a late 1930s Welles at a CBS radio microphone next to a War of the Worlds poster. It also features artwork from his landmark movie Citizen Kane.
Welles was educated at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock from 1926 to 1931. In 1934, he co-directed his first film, an eight-minute short “The Hearts of Age,” in Woodstock, organized the Todd Theatre Festival there and published Everybody’s Shakespeare on Todd Press. He visited the Illinois campus in the years that followed. His eldest daughter, Chris Welles Feder, attended Todd in the late 1940s.
In an October 1945 Los Angeles Times interview uncovered by biographer Simon Callow, Welles spoke to Hedda Hopper about his desire to return to Todd School in Woodstock. “My real interest in life is education. I want to be a teacher … One day I shall leave all this behind me, go back there, and give full rein to my ideas. That’s when life will really begin for me.”
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