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Article: Orson Welles: Grand debut to sad curtain
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- April 23, 1989
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright (null) Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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Citizen Welles By Frank Brady. Scribner's. $24.95.
Orson Welles may have led the most public life since that of
Louis XVI. At age 3 Welles made his stage debut as a performer for
the Chicago Opera. He died at 70 in 1985, shortly after appearing on
the Merv Griffin Show. From "Madame Butterfly" to Merv may seem a
damning decline, but, oh, the glories in between! Welles was seldom
far from the limelight, and a case can be made that the period
between 1934 and 1943 was the Orsonian Era, when his talents ruled
the performing arts (theater, radio, films) with a charisma rivaling
that of Franklin D. Roosevelt in politics.
Naturally there came an anticlimax, the longest, most dissected
and ...