Few tasks have proven more intractable for the show business biographer than constructing a viable, comprehensive, and, above all, convincing life of Orson Welles (1915-1985), a cultural iconoclast whose sheer range of entertainment media personae—actor, director, master of ceremonies, broadcaster, traveler, raconteur, shill—does more to distort than clarify his identity for posterity. And if the mettlesome post-1970s attempts of Charles Higham, Barbara Leaming, Frank Brady, and David Thomson remain frustratingly unbalanced by their own subjective engagements with Welles’s seductive mythology, it is a tendency that has shown few signs of abating throughout the last decade and more. The British journalist Clinton Heylin offered little more than puerile stylistics in his Despite the System (2005); Joseph McBride became far too preoccupied in What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (2006), with forgettable exchanges between an increasingly insufferable crowd of hangers-on surrounding his subject; and the director’s unsung cinematographer Gary Graver provided charming anecdotes but few revelations about his mentor in a posthumous memoir published in 2008. Far more encouraging was the arrival last year of two eminently readable treatments, Patrick McGilligan’s comprehensive Young Orson and Orson Welles’s Last Movie by Josh Karp—both admirably detailed and straightforward in approach, however limited in their focus.

Source: The Lion in Autumn | The Weekly Standard