Profile · Kenosha, Wisconsin
George Orson Welles
Actor, director, and broadcaster; born in Kenosha on May 6, 1915
$400,000
George Orson Welles was Kenosha's most famous son and spent almost no childhood being a son of Kenosha, a joke he never tired of telling. He was born on May 6, 1915, in an upstairs flat at 6116 Seventh Avenue, across from Library Park, and named for Kenosha lawyers in the family tree, including great-grandfather Orson S. Head. His father, Richard Head Welles, made bicycle-lamp money and worked at American Brass; his mother, Beatrice Ives, was a concert pianist. The marriage cracked, and the family moved to Chicago around 1919. He returned at nine for his mother's funeral, a bleak visit that later colored every rude thing he said about the town. Todd School, the Mercury Theatre, The War of the Worlds in 1938, and Citizen Kane in 1941 at age twenty-five followed. The career that ate studios for breakfast still could not finish The Other Side of the Wind in his lifetime. In a 1937 letter to a Kenosha congressman he called the city "vital and charming" and himself "almost belligerently Midwestern, and always a confirmed badger." Decades later he told Milwaukee-born scholar Joseph McBride he was not ashamed of Wisconsin, "just of being from Kenosha. It's a terrible place." He died in Los Angeles on October 10, 1985. The Seventh Avenue duplex remains a private house; the historical marker stands on the park side. Kenosha keeps the birth certificate and the quarrel.