I understood from the beginning, though I had just one medium-sized, single-volume biography of Charles Laughton under my belt,  that any account of Orson Welles would be big. His life was so complex, his achievements so multifarious, his personality so unfathomable, the myths so pervasive, that I was sure that  if I was to understand him at all I would have to cast my net very wide, at the same time as going deep down under the surface; one volume, I knew, could never do him justice. 

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