Stage and film actor, and director, born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, USA. The son of a wealthy inventor and a concert pianist, he was a precocious child who staged mini-productions of Shakespeare in his house. When his mother died (1925), he went on a world tour with his father, then attended a private school in Illinois where he continued to direct plays (1926–31). With his father’s death (1927), he became the ward of a Chicago physician, Dr Maurice Bernstein. Welles turned down college and set off for Ireland on a sketching tour - he had shown talent as an artist - and ended up acting with Dublin’s famous Gate Theatre (1931). He returned to the USA in 1932, toured with Katharine Cornell’s road company, and made his Broadway debut (as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet) in 1934, the year he also gave his first radio performance. With John Houseman he collaborated on productions for the Phoenix Theatre Group and the Federal Theater Project, and they co-founded the Mercury Theatre (1937), noted for such productions as an all African-American Macbeth. In 1938, Welles and Houseman began to produce plays on their Mercury Theatre on the Air, and on 30 October that year, as a Halloween spoof, they broadcast a dramatization of H G Wells’s War of the Worlds, so realistic in conveying a Martian invasion that it led to actual panic throughout the USA.