Actor: Orson Welles

Orson Welles directed and starred in Citizen Kane at twenty-five, having been given control by RKO that no first-time filmmaker had received before or since. The deep focus photography, the overlapping sound and the fragmented biographical structure were all unusual and all in service of a simple problem: a man cannot be summarised.

William Randolph Hearst attempted to suppress the film and largely succeeded commercially, and RKO recut The Magnificent Ambersons while Welles was in Brazil, destroying the excised footage. He never held that much control again.

As an actor he is superb in other people’s films, and The Third Man gives him about ten minutes and the best speech in it. He funded his own later projects by taking acting work and voiceovers he found humiliating.

He left multiple films unfinished. The Other Side of the Wind was completed and released in 2018, more than thirty years after his death.