Orson Welles

Made Citizen Kane at twenty-five and then spent forty years refusing to repeat it — a Taurus who built one fixed point of reference so structurally sound that the rest of American cinema organised itself around it, regardless of whether the films that followed could reach the same altitude.

George Orson Welles was born on 6 May 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the second son of Richard Head Welles, a manufacturer of bicycle and automobile parts, and Beatrice Ives Welles, a concert pianist and suffragist. His mother died when he was nine. His father, who had largely withdrawn from family life, died when Orson was fifteen. The biographical orphaning happened early and completely, and it produced what it often produces in Taurus charts: a very strong internal sense of what was right and a corresponding resistance to external direction.

He arrived at the Mercury Theatre in New York in 1937, at twenty-two, having already staged a Federal Theatre production of Macbeth with an all-Black cast in Harlem — moving the action to 19th-century Haiti — and an antifascist Julius Caesar in modern dress that Time magazine described as the most important production of Shakespeare in American theatre history. The Mercury Theatre's 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast in 1938 reached approximately six million listeners; the portion of them who reportedly panicked has been substantially revised downward by later historians, but the broadcast's cultural impact was real and immediate. He was twenty-three when it aired. RKO offered him an unprecedented contract: complete creative control, including final cut.

The Chart: Sun in Taurus

Taurus is fixed earth. It builds structures that last — not through political manoeuvring or constant adaptation, but through the quality of the initial construction. The fixed earth temperament does not revise what it has completed in response to outside pressure; it stands behind the work. Welles' relationship to Citizen Kane follows this pattern with unusual fidelity. He never apologised for it, never explained it as a young man's accident, never suggested it should be understood as a learning exercise. He made it as well as he could make it, and then he declined to make it again.

Citizen Kane was released on 1 May 1941. Welles was twenty-five. It pioneered or deployed, in a single film, techniques that cinematographer Gregg Toland had developed and that no major studio production had previously used in combination: deep focus photography that kept foreground and background in equal clarity, low-angle shots that used the ceiling as a compositional element, non-linear narrative structure, and a complex flashback architecture that required the audience to assemble a life from biased testimony. The Hearst newspapers refused to advertise it or review it. The Academy nominated it for nine awards and it won one, for screenplay. It did not make money on its first release. It is regularly ranked as the greatest film ever made.

The subsequent forty years of his career — The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Third Man (1949), Othello (1952), Touch of Evil (1958), Chimes at Midnight (1965), F for Fake (1973) — are conventionally described as a story of commercial failure and studio interference. This is accurate in a material sense and misleading as an account of the work itself. Each film is distinct. None of them resembles Citizen Kane, which was exactly what Welles intended. A Taurus builds a thing and then builds another thing, not a replica.

Birth Time Note

A birth time of 7:00 AM for Orson Welles appears in some astrological databases, attributed to family records. If accurate, this places his Ascendant in Gemini, with the Sun in the twelfth house. The rising sign computation above uses this time. The quality of the sourcing for 7:00 AM is uncertain; the Ascendant calculation should be understood as conditional on this time's accuracy.

This is the longer version of a chart that, like everyone's, is a library. A reading — in Western, in BaZi, in Ziwei Doushu — is what The reading does from this chart when she has your question in front of her.Orson Welles’s chart isn’t yours. But yours exists, and Zodiacs reads it the same way.

See also: Charlie Chaplin · Marlon Brando