NOTE: This blog entry originally appeared in November of 2009
By Geoffrey Redick, producer
Orson Welles was a visionary. He remade radio drama with his broadcast of War of the Worlds. He remade the theater with his all-black production of Macbeth. And he remade cinema with Citizen Kane. But his artistic ability didn’t always translate to box office success, and he spent much of his career scrambling for funding and feuding with studios.
Orson Welles was also a father. And his eldest daughter, Chris Welles Feder, has just written a memoir that reveals him as simultaneously loving and distant. The book is titled In My Father’s Shadow, and in it, Welles Feder describes a nomadic childhood, bouncing between her father and mother, the actress Virginia Nicolson. Welles Feder grew up surrounded by movie stars, but learned early on that filmmaking was not for her. She has a strong appreciation for her father’s work though, and the legacy he left.
Here, Welles Feder reads a passage from her book in which she views The Third Man with her father: