Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts

by Todd Tarbox

This is the HARDBACK version. I found Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts fascinating, touching, and revealing of Orson and Roger. It certainly is the Orson I knew in all his complexity and brilliance. - PETER BOGDANOVICH, American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and author I read A Friendship in Three Acts with absolute delight. At last I have got what I have been looking for in vain till now: the sound of Welles's private voice, the warmth, easiness, modesty, fantasy of which so many have spoken but which none have been able to reproduce... - SIMON CALLOW, English actor, writer, director, and author The major and longest-lasting close friendship of Orson Welles's life was with one of his earliest role models-his teacher, advisor, and theatrical mentor at the Todd School who later became the school's headmaster, Roger Hill. Hill's grandson, Todd Tarbox, has given us invaluable and candidly intimate glimpses into many of its stages... - JONATHAN ROSENBAUM, American film critic and author

Genres: Film

328 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2013

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderful and heartfelt tribute to friendship, full of fascinating personal memories and touchstones along the way. The segment about Black serviceman Isaac Woodard, was particularly poignant and unfortunately still pertinent.... Kudos to the author for a loving double portrait!

[degelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the antidote to My Lunches with Orson , which was based on taped conversations between writer-director Henry Jaglom and Welles in the last years of his life. During that same time period there were multiple recorded phone calls between Welles and his friend Roger Hill, and the tone and content of these conversations couldn't have been more different.

So who is the "real" Welles? Probably both. He was well aware of this himself. "Everything about me is a contradiction," he said, "and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There’s a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.”

Perhaps his conversations with Jaglom represented the philistine, while with Hill he was the aesthete. Still, I would push this a bit further and suggest Hill was one of the few people who knew Welles as he truly was. After all, he had known him since he was a kid, long before he became a public figure. Their friendship lasted for decades and it seems Hill was one of the most stable presences in Welles' freewheeling and chaotic life. There was a history and understanding between the two that was precious to both, especially when it comes to their politics and common interests.

Sadly, the fact that Hill outlived Welles (he was twenty years older) seems cruel considering they were making plans to see each other. When Welles died I'm sure Hollywood went to work immediately- typing up their obituaries, readying their "best of" clips and supplying soundbites for the media- but the end of this book captures someone who actually cared about this man, mourning not as a colleague, competitor or critic, but as a friend.

Fortunately we have their friendship in book form, a way to visit both of these men long after they've gone.