Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World

Callow, Simon

Harper Press

Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

William Collins

Shooting the Actor

RANDOM HOUSE UK

ORSON WELLES, VOLUME 1

Vintage

From Citizen Kane to Macbeth, Simon Callow’s brilliant biography of Orson Welles explores the breakdown of his Hollywood career.When Citizen Kane, his first film, opened in 1941, Welles was universally acclaimed as the most audacious filmmaker alive. But instead of marking the beginning of a triumphant career in Hollywood, the film proved to be an exception in Welles’s life and work. He found it increasingly impossible to function within Hollywood’s system. Project after project foundered, either abandoned incomplete, or was released in very different form from the one he intended. Finally, in 1947, he left America for Europe where for the best part of twenty years he lived in self-imposed exile, occasionally and briefly returning to stage a play, make a film or shoot a television drama.Hello Americans reveals the immense complexities of Welles’s temperament as well as some of the monstrous personalities with whom he had to contend. At the same time, the book gives full weight to the almost bewildering range of his activities beyond Hollywood. The thread that runs through this apparently incoherent blur of activity is an often-frustrated engagement with his native land, its faults, its arts, its history. But by 1947, he had said all that he had to say to his fellow citizens; it was Goodbye Americans for two decades of experimental, innovative but essentially European work.

Orson Welles: Hello Americans

Humor & Entertainment

Vintage Books

Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band

In One-Man Band, the third volume in his epic survey of Orson Welles’ life and work, Simon Callow again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex artists of the twentieth century, looking closely at the triumphs and failures of an ambitious one-man assault on one medium after another – theatre, radio, film, television, even, at one point, ballet – in each of which his radical and original approach opened up new directions and hitherto unglimpsed possibilities. 
The book begins with Welles’ self-exile from America, and his realisation that he could only function happily as an independent film-maker, a one-man band; by 1964, he had filmed Othello, which took three years to complete, Mr Arkadin, the biggest conundrum in his output, and his masterpiece Chimes at Midnight, as well as Touch of Evil, his sole return to Hollywood and, like all too many of his films, wrested from his grasp and re-edited. Along the way he made inroads into the fledgling medium of television and a number of stage plays, including Moby-Dick, considered by theatre historians to be one of the seminal productions of the century. Meanwhile, his private life was as dramatic as his professional life. The book shows what it was like to be around Welles, and, with a precision rarely attempted before, what it was like to be him, in which lies the answer to the old riddle: whatever happened to Orson Welles?

A definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's finest actors and directors, written with great insight and verve by Simon Callow. The creator of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Henry VIII and Captain Bligh, Charles Laughton's career spans 50 films and 40 stage roles. This enthralling biography follows him from his parents' hotel in Scarborough to his climactic assumption of the role of King Lear in Statford at the end of his life. Along the way we meet a galaxy of Hollywood greats -- from Korda, Hitchcock and Billy WIlder to Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe. We also discover a hugely talented and complex man -- a legend in his own lifetime who nonetheless counted himself a failure.

Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

A gloomy assessment of the state of British theatre today: the decline of ensemble playing; lack of training for young actors; novelty replacing substance. It ends with a warning that without attention to stagecraft, British theatre will surely die.

Being An Actor

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

Penguin Uk

A successful British actor briefly recounts his career, describes the experiences every actor goes through, and reveals his own feelings about what acting should be

Being an Actor

Penguin

“A splendidly entertaining, definitive work.”—Entertainment Weekly In this first installment of his masterful biography, Simon Callow captures the chameleonic genius of Orson Welles as only an actor/director deeply rooted in the entertainment industry could. Here is Welles’s prodigious childhood; his youth in New York, with its fraught partnership with John Houseman and the groundbreaking triumph of his all-black Macbeth; the pioneering radio work that culminated in the notorious 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds; and finally, his work in Hollywood, including an authoritative account of the making of Citizen Kane. Rich in detail and insight, this is far and away the definitive look at Orson Welles—a figure even more extraordinary than the myths that have surrounded him.

Orson Welles, Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Publishing Group

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Books by Callow, Simon