The Unholy Welles of Ireland

One of the most shameless pieces of name-dropping in the long history of this column was by an unidentified diarist in November 1938. His excuse was a controversy then reverberating in the US. Pretending to be worried, he ventured: “I wonder what my one-time friend Orson Welles is feeling like today after that broadcast which seems to have driven half of America into the dithers”.

The broadcast was Welles's radio production of The War of the Worlds, which had caused mass hysteria among listeners and, in the process, secured the young director's fame.

And presumably he was now too busy to return his old pal’s calls, or the matter of his feelings could have been canvassed directly. But it is, in fairness, entirely plausible that they had been friends, because as everyone knows, Welles had launched his stellar career only a few years previously on the stage of Dublin’s Gate Theatre.

In fact it may well have been the same diarist, wearing the hat of drama critic, who in October 1931 flagged the teenage American's world premiere in a play called Jew Süss. The play was interesting in itself. Adapted from a novel of the same name, it was about a German-Jewish financier from the 18th-century court of Duke Karl Alexander of Württemburg. And its philosemitic tone – further popularised by a 1934 movie version – so annoyed the Nazis that they had the film remade as an anti-Semitic travesty of the original. But the Dublin production is now mainly remembered for its illustrious debutante, who left a big impression on The Irish Times critic, if not not quite driving him into the dithers.

“A new actor, Mr Orson Welles, made an excellent Karl Alexander,” said the review. Then it added primly: “It will be necessary to see him in other parts before it can be said that he is the accomplished actor that he seemed last night in a part that might have been especially made for him.”

In later years, Welles liked to joke of his Gate debut that he had “started at the top and worked my way down”. That wasn’t quite true, of course, even if his eventual decline was indeed precipitous.

Ten years after Jew Süss, he directed Citizen Kane, which nearly three-quarters of a century later still heads the all-time favourite lists of many critics. Later masterpieces include The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Touch of Evil (1958), with its famous 3½-minute "tracking shot" of a couple driving across the Mexican-American border with a ticking bomb in the boot.

In between, resuming his relationship with the Gate, he starred in a short film called Return to Glennascaul, playing himself as a driver having spooky experiences with Irish hitchhikers. Written by Hilton Edwards and directed by Micheál Mac Liammóir, it was only 23 minutes long. Yet, sprinkled with Welles's stardust, even that earned an Oscar nomination.

The Playboy of the Western World was not among the theatrical classics Welles starred in during his time in Ireland, so far as I know. But if the actor's own accounts are reliable, his real-life experiences the Aran Islands may have outdone Christy Mahon's.

Recalling them many years later, he claimed he could “hardly draw a breath” on the Arans such was the amorous attention paid him: “...these great, marvellous girls in their white petticoats, they’d grab me. Off the petticoats would go [...] and all with husbands out in their skin-covered canoes.”

Whatever about the husbands in the currachs, Welles claimed, his presence became a concern to the local priest. “I had another confession this morning,” the latter allegedly said one day: “When are you leaving?”

So even allowing for embellishment, Welles’s legacies to Ireland may not have been confined to the stage of the Gate. There could be a few second- or third-generation Harry Lime lookalikes ghosting around the greater Connemara area even now, waiting for a spotlight to fall.

More than most future movie stars, Orson himself was probably fated to have his name in lights, one way or another. His father had made a fortune from designing bicycle lamps, before selling his share in the company for $100,000 and proceeding to drink the profits.

It is said that Welles was a mixture of the old man’s earthy habits and of his mother’s love of culture. The couple didn’t stay together long, as it happened, and neither lived to see their son an adult. But to the eternal gratitude of cinema, they collaborated long enough to produce one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, who was born 100 years ago today.

@FrankmcnallyIT