Born George Orson Welles to Richard Head Welles and Beatrice Ives Welles, May 15, 1915. "I never blamed my folks for Kenosha -- Kenosha has always blamed my folks for me," Welles was reported to have grumbled. In 1919, his parents separated.

A year earlier, the family had moved to Chicago. During Orson's boyhood, his father grew increasingly alcoholic and not inclined to work. His mother, once an accomplished pianist and a suffragette, became sickly. In May of 1924, when Orson was only nine, he was summoned to his mother's sickroom for what were to be some of their last moments together. She died in a Chicago hospital two days later.

By every account Orson found formal education to be tedious but in 1926, just as his unhappy childhood was gradually slipping into a lonely adolescence, a rescue arrived when he was enrolled in the Todd School. At eleven, he was introduced the school's revered headmaster, the man who became his first real father, Roger Hill.

It was at the Todd School, where Welles was given free access to the campus theatre and its printing press, that the impresario was truly born. Encouraged and nurtured by the Hills, Orson wrote, directed and performed a variety of roles, including that of the Virgin Mary in the school nativity play!