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Books

Homage to awesome Welles on his centenary

Both Patrick McGilligan and Simon Callow sympathetically capture the larger-than-life maverick who detested appearing in any film that wasn’t his own

12 December 2015

9:00 AM

12 December 2015

9:00 AM

Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Patrick McGilligan

Harper, pp.832, £20, ISBN: 9780062112484

Orson Welles: One Man Band Simon Callow

Cape, pp.496, £25, ISBN: 9780224079358

One day in May 1948 in the Frascati hills southeast of Rome, Orson Welles took his new secretary, Rita Ribolla, to lunch. After eating enough food for ‘a dozen hungry people’ and sinking ‘one glass of wine after another’, all the while enchanting his guest with gossip and conjuring tricks, Welles downed his coffee and said it was time to go.

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