Twenty-six episodes of this variety show aired during its life of Jan. 26 to Jul. 19, ‘44. Guests included Lucille Ball, Lionel Barrymore, King Cole Trio, and Groucho Marx, and Jimmy Durante.
Right after the WWII D-Day Invasion of Normandy, Welles aired a special episode for D-day, in which a woman named Agnes Moorehead, the wife of a fighter pilot who was in France, read an open letter to her infant son.
On Oct. 10, 1985, Welles appeared on The Merv Griffin Show in what would be his last public appearance before his death. It is made all the more poignant by the personal, wistful turn the discussion takes. Dressed in a Navy blue jacket with a sky blue shirt and an ascot, Welles says that not long ago he’d begun thinking he was 70 when really only 69, meaning that he’d given himself an extra year. He told Griffin that he experienced “certain parts of every day that are joyous,” continuing, “I’m not essentially a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.” On the difference between the two, he said, “joy is a great big electrical experience, but happiness is...a warthog can be happy.” He died in the early morning, slumped over his typewriter, of a heart attack. He’d been, as in life, working on a script for one of his crammed schedule of projects. It was a script for a TV show tentatively titled “Orson Welles Solo.” Welles was cremated and a stark funeral was hastily arran...
While Orson Welles never acted in or produced any version of George Orwell’s Novel 1984 , he is associated with the work because of the similarity in named. Some people think Orville Wright invented really good popcorn, or that Bill Cosby sang “White Christmas.” This is the same phenomenon. However, there’s no reason not to know what Welles was doing in 1984. It was the year in which he voiced the lead chipmunk in a film called Enchanted Journey . He also played a supportive role (Klingsor) in Where is Parsifal ? a film that holds the distinction of bringing together Tony Curtis and Erik Estrada. For Orson Welles, 1984 was not the highlight of his career, but I’d guess that for Welles, Orwell’s 1984 was a great read.
Welles was a self-identified “progressive” who was hounded for being a leftist and sometimes probed or followed by various Red Scare-oriented committees of the U.S. government. He first threw his hat into the arena of politics and current events in October of 1943, speaking at the Third Free World Dinner at NYC’s Hotel Pennsylvania. Others taking the rostrum were a British Minister, a U.S. Colonel and a Chinese ambassador. He also gave two speeches in November on behalf of the American Free World Association, which was committed to the destruction of fascism. As a companion to these appearances at conferences, Welles began publishing essays in the left-wing journal Free World, edited by Louis Dolivet, a French emigre who’d risen among the ranks of American and exile wartime politics. Welles espoused the Free Worlders’ value of internationalism, which was positioned opposite the isolationism prevalent in America as the second Great War rumbled on. This stance garnered s...
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