This work charts the life of a man who stilled the world with his performance in Citizen Kane in 1941. It traces the rise and fall of one of Hollywood's greatest innovators - raconteur nonpareil, gifted with invention and awesome talent whose early success bored him and triggered the long decline into excess and self-destruction. This biography probes the essential questions surrounding Welles, realizing the ferocious energy and demonic intellect behind the boy genius. Despite his production of dazzling Broadway theatre and radio drama, and his performance - perhaps the best in his career - as Harry Lime in The Third Man, he lived in a strange twilight world where he felt rejected and hopelessly unfulfilled. The work ends with the final rootless years, when he yielded to obesity and the genius Welles became a tragic figure.