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George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 - October 10, 1985) was an Academy Award-winning American director, writer, actor and producer for film, stage, radio and television. Critical appreciation for Welles has increased since his death. He is now widely acknowledged as one of the most important dramatic artists of the 20th century, in 2002 being voted in a BFI Top Ten Directors poll by the British Film Institute as the greatest film director of all time. Welles first gained wide notoriety for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds . Adapted to sound like a contemporary news broadcast, it caused a large number of listeners to panic. Welles and his biographers subsequently claimed he was exposing the gullibility of American audiences in the tense preamble to the Second World War. In the mid-1930s, his New York theatre adaptations of an all-black voodoo Macbeth and a contemporary allegorical Julius Caesar became legendary. Welles was also an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety spectacles in the war years. During this period he became a serious political activist and commentator through journalism, radio and public appearances closely associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1941, he co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in Citizen Kane , often chosen in polls of film critics as the greatest film ever made. Citizen Kane is the only film of Welles for which he possessed sufficient funds and complete creative control to the final cut, and the rest of his career was often obstructed by lack of funds, incompetent studio interference and bad luck, both during exile in Europe and brief returns to Hollywood. Despite these difficulties Othello won the 1952 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Touch of Evil won the top prize at the Brussels World Fair, while Welles himself considered The Trial and Chimes at Midnight to be the best of his efforts. Although Welles remained on the margins of the main studios as a director/producer, his larger-than-life personality made him a bankable actor. In his latter years he struggled against a Hollywood system that refused to finance his independent film projects, making a living largely through acting, commercials, and voice-over work. Welles received a 1975 American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement award, the third person to do so after John Ford and James Cagney.
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