In death Orson Welles remains a legendary, outsized, and ambiguous figure. Peter Conrad's study is a critical biography of Welles, viewing the man through the optic of his sprawling and yet singular body of work. This is not a debunking of the well-aired Welles-as-genius myth so much as an attempt to explain the sources of his polymorphous gifts, through an expert examination of the many personae he adopted in a life lived large.