Paola Mori

From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
Jump to: navigation, search
Paola Mori
Born Paola di Girifalco, Contessa di Girifalco
(1928-09-18)18 September 1928
Italy
Died Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist.
Las Vegas, Nevada
Cause of death Injuries sustained from a car accident
Nationality Italian
Occupation Actress
Years active 1953–1962
Spouse(s) Orson Welles
(married 1955–1985)
Children Beatrice Welles

Paola di Girifalco, Contessa di Girifalco (18 September 1928 – 12 August 1986), better known by her professional name Paola Mori, was an Italian actress and aristocrat, and the third and final wife of Orson Welles.[1]

Biography

She was born in 1928 to an Italian aristocratic family. By 1953, she had begun carving out a career for herself as a film actress, playing supporting roles in several Italian films.

In 1953 Mori met Orson Welles, and soon began a romance. The following year he cast her in the female lead of his film Mr. Arkadin, which was released in 1955. The couple had a "shotgun wedding" after Welles impregnated Mori, and Mori's Catholic parents feared for their family's reputation if the two did not marry.[2] The couple married in London on 8 May 1955, and their daughter Beatrice Welles was born in New York on 13 November 1955, six months later.[3]

After the release of Mr. Arkadin, she was stung by the wave of negative reviews of her performance (in which her voice had been dubbed by Billie Whitelaw, to conceal her strong Italian accent), and once she was married to Welles, she acted in only a handful of her husband's projects, and then withdrew from acting altogether. By 1962, the couple were effectively living separate lives. Film historian Andrew J. Rausch writes, "the couple was estranged from the mid-1960s through [to] Welles's death in 1985, but they never divorced."[4] According to Gary Graver, one of Welles' closest friends and collaborators for the last 15 years of his life, "She never paid any attention to him. Orson said that Paola refused to divorce him. He said that there were two reasons for this: (1) she was Catholic and the Catholics looked down on divorce and (2) she wanted to be Mrs. Orson Welles."[5] Graver's description is at odds with accounts given by Beatrice Welles, who says her mother provided a loving, stable home life for the filmmaker, though the two lived apart in the final year of his life.[6]

From 1966 onwards, Welles divided his time between a home with Mori and their daughter, and a home with his long-term mistress Oja Kodar, but Mori and Kodar never met in his lifetime. Welles was also an infrequent presence at the home with Mori, citing the demands of work. Although British tabloids reported his affair with Kodar as early as 1969 (which was a factor in his moving permanently to the United States in 1970), both Mori and her daughter remained oblivious as to Kodar's existence until 1984. In the 1970s, Welles set up a home with his wife and daughter in the United States, first in Sedona, Arizona, then in Las Vegas, Nevada, ostensibly because the climate would be good for his asthma. But while they lived in Nevada, he spent most of his time in Los Angeles, where he openly shared a house with Kodar. When Mori found out about Kodar in 1984, she threw Welles out of their Nevada house, and neither Mori nor Beatrice Welles saw him for the last year of his life, although they still talked regularly on the telephone. Beatrice states: "They sort of separated toward the end because he had a girlfriend. My mother found out about it, and he denied it. She told him he could come back home as soon as he stopped lying to her. He didn't come home during that last year of his life, but he and my mother talked on the phone every day."[7]

This situation had serious ramifications for the copyright status of Welles's work after his death. Welles left Kodar his Los Angeles home and the rights to his unfinished films, and turned the rest over to Mori. Mori contended that she should have been left everything, and a year after Welles's death, Mori and Kodar finally agreed on the settlement of his will. On the way to their meeting to sign the papers, however, Mori was killed in a car accident in Las Vegas on August 12, 1986. Mori's half of the estate was inherited by Beatrice, who came to an arrangement with Kodar in December 1986. Legal wranglings between the two have persisted for over 25 years, leading to complex ongoing legal battles over who owns Welles's unfinished films - legal action by Beatrice has at least three times prevented Welles's last film, The Other Side of the Wind, from being completed, though she joined producers in October 2014 in an effort to finish the film. [8] Beatrice launched legal action to try to stop a re-release of Welles' Touch of Evil in 1998 because it had not been screened for her in advance. She cited her unhappiness with a restoration of the unfinished film of Don Quixote that had taken place a few years earlier as a source of concern.[9]

Filmography

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Christopher Welles Feder, In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles (Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 2009) p.168
  3. ↑ Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich [Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.)], This is Orson Welles (DaCapo Press, New York, 1992 [rev. 1998 ed.]) pp.417, 419
  4. ↑ Gary Graver with Andrew J. Rausch, Making Movies With Orson Welles: A Memoir (Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland, 2008) p.13
  5. ↑ Gary Graver with Andrew J. Rausch, Making Movies With Orson Welles: A Memoir (Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland, 2008) pp.7-8
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lois Armstrong, 'Once Moor with Feeling: Orson Welles's Daughter Beatrice Restores His Lost Masterpiece, Othello', People magazine interview, April 27, 1992 Vol. 37 No. 16
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

Retrieved from "https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Paola_Mori&oldid=714207245"