"There are no second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 a few miles from the Hollywood editing table where Orson Welles was giving birth to his own screen legend with Citizen Kane. The sin of Welles' life was that it had two complementary, all-American acts: heroic tragedy, then celebrity farce. By the time he was 25, Welles had traveled the world, appeared at the Gate Theater in Dublin, stormed Broadway with crackling, sepulchral productions of Shakespeare and The Cradle Will Rock, scared America out of its wits with his War of the Worlds radio caprice,...
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