Show notes
In September of 1952, Orson Welles worked with the BBC for a portrait of early American director Robert Flaherty. Flaherty, who directed the first docu-drama film, Nanook of the North in 1922, had passed away the previous July.
As Welles just mentioned, when he got to Hollywood in the late 1930s, he was fascinated by the early film people, and they were more than happy to share their stories with the then-Boy Wonder.
In April of 1953 the BBC hired Welles to read one hour of poetry from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
The next month the Italian comedy Man, Beast and Virtue debuted, in which Welles co-starred.
From September 7th into October, Welles was involved with Ballet de Paris at the Stoll Theatre in London for a production of The Lady in the Ice. In October the production moved to Paris.
Welles directed, wrote the libretto and was the ballet's costume and set designer.
He later told Peter Bogdonovich, “It was very successful in London, and only moderately so in Paris, where it was very badly lit — as everything always is in Paris. The plot is: a girl's been found, like dinosaurs have been found, in a block of ice. And she's on display in a sort of carnival. A young man falls in love with her, and his love melts the ice. And when she kisses him, he turns to ice. A little parable for our times.” It would be the only ballet Orson Welles’ ever directed.
In late September of 1953 Broadcasting Magazine reported that Harry Alan Towers had sold shows to both ABC and NBC for the fall. ABC would welcome Horatio Hornblower back for a second season, starring Michael Redgrave.
Meanwhile on NBC, a new half-hour anthology program starring Sir Lawrence Olivier called Theatre Royal would take to the air.
The program debuted on October 4th, 1953 with Orson Welles starring in an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.” Pushkin wrote “The Queen of Spades” in the fall of 1833. It’s a short story about how human greed can lead to madness.
Theatre Royal was developed to capitalize on Lawrence Olivier’s name. At the time the program launched, Olivier and then-wife Vivian Leigh were getting set to appear in Terence Rattigan's comedy, The Sleeping Prince in the West End. The play would run for eight months. It made Olivier temporarily unable to star in his own program.
Many fine actors of the British stage and screen were involved in individual episodes of Theatre Royal, like Robert Morley, Harry Andrews, Muriel Forbes, and Daphne Maddox. The music was credited to Sidney Torch.
Once Sir Lawrence Olivier could no longer appear, Sir Ralph Richardson took over as host of Theatre Royal.
Selected episodes were repeated, with a different series opening and closing on ABC Mystery Time in the late 1950s. The show remained in active syndication in the U.S. into the 1970s.
Welles briefly returned to America to make his first appearance on TV, starring in the Omnibus presentation of King Lear, broadcast live on CBS on October 18th, 1953. It was directed by Peter Brook, and co-starred Natasha Parry, Beatrice Straight and Arnold Moss.
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