Prodigy

The following mordant commentary is from a retrospective piece appearing in the January 1940 number of the Saturday Evening Post:

After being a celebrity ... in Dublin and London, he had returned home [the following year] expecting to be a Broadway celebrity. But he got to the Algonquin without being mobbed. He discovered people in the lobby not talking about him. In Times Square he found large groups of people not mentioning him. A celebrity has a negative or an inverted sense of hearing: he can hear his name not being mentioned at forty paces. Everywhere he went, nonmention of his name drummed on his ear. He was bewildered. [...] By rights, [theater moguls] the Shuberts should have met him at the docks.

The celebrity in question was Orson Welles the first volume of whose wonderfully written and meticulously researched biography, Orson Welles: The Road To Xanadu, by Simon Callow I've just begun to read. I've gotten through only the first one-hundred-and-fifty pages, but already the life of the young Orson Welles has left me all but breathless so varied and broad in experience, and so rich in accomplishment it was.

The trip abroad referred to in the above quoted retrospective had taken Welles to Ireland where, traveling alone, and after myriad adventures in Galway and the country's West Coast, he'd set off for Dublin, and on arrival immediately presented himself to the directors of Dublin's famous Gate Theater to whom he announced he was available. His offer of services was duly accepted, and he was given the role of the middle-aged Duke Karl Alexander, the crucial second leading role in the play, Jew Süss, which had had a hit run in London's storied West End some four years previous.

Welles's performance was a triumph — a genuine phenomenon — eliciting delirious applause and cheering cum standing ovations from audiences, and unanimous raves in the theater critical press. "Interesting at every moment," said The Herald. "The young American actor received nothing short of a personal triumph," declared Dublin Opinion. "A touch of humanity and simplicity in [the Duke's] swinishness which in less expert hands might have been lost ... Orson Welles captured it magnificently," trumpeted The Independent. And this from J.J. Hayes, the New York Times's man in Dublin:

The Duke is played by a young American actor [Orson Welles] whose performance is astonishingly fine. [...] Dublin is eager to see him in other roles.... His coming will probably lead to the production of Coriolanus which was shelved ... because a suitable man could not be found for the title part ... 35 years since it was done in Ireland by Sir Frank Benson.

The last bit about Coriolanus was fed to Hayes by The Gate Theater Press Office, the presiding officer of which was ... Orson Welles.

All this took place in 1931. Orson Welles had just turned sixteen.