The conventional wisdom regarding Orson Welles is that he reached the very pinnacle of his career as the boy wonder genius behind Citizen Kane and spent the rest of his life tumbling back to earth. His decline and fall have been the subject of countless premature obituary writers who were only too ready to label him as Hollywood’s youngest has-been. There has always seemed something sadistic in the way commentators rushed to dismiss decades of unfinished films and unrealised dreams.

Simon Callow has always taken a refreshingly different view of Welles’ career and has proved himself to be an industrious, insightful, sympathetic and fair-minded biographer over the past 20 years. Callow’s original intention of writing a two-volume work on Welles has mushroomed to the point that Orson Welles: One Man Band is the third book in a series that Callow now promises will be completed within four volumes.

One Man Band covers Welles’ life from his exile in Europe in the late 1940s to his bittersweet creation of Chimes At Midnight in the middle of the 1960s, a film that Callow astutely hails as one of the most personal and revealing that Welles ever made. It is a period of last chances and cruel partings. The brilliant film noir thriller Touch Of Evil was the last full-length feature that Welles directed in his native America. The theatrical production of Chimes At Midnight marked his last appearance on the stage. All of this and more came before he had even celebrated his forty-fifth birthday. There is an air of melancholy and regret that permeates much of the book and yet Callow writes not in sadness but in wonder at the swashbuckling resilience of Welles as he gamely ventures on in search of the next adventure and the latest opportunity to exercise his prodigious talents.

Welles has such energy and appetites, pushing himself and everyone around him to their breaking point with his complete commitment to the work at hand. Stage productions are rehearsed through all the hours of the night. Films are shot until crews collapse and casts mutiny. His drive is endless and you suspect there is an element of squeezing the most from every creative experience because Welles never knew when it might be his last. A great many of these post-war years are spent chasing finance and avoiding bankruptcy. Welles becomes like a figure from a Werner Herzog film crazily determined to move mountains and willing everyone to follow him to the ends of the earth.

Callow is commendable for his willingness to acknowledge Welles’ less than admirable qualities. Welles could be arrogant, cavalier with the fortunes of other and insufferably petty, especially when slumming it in a lucrative cameo role for a director he regarded with ill-disguised contempt and jealousy. Why was this incompetent imposter allowed to make films when the great Welles was frustrated at every turn? There is chapter and verse on Welles ability to hurt but also endless testimonials from those who flourished in his presence. Charlton Heston regarded Welles as the most exciting director he had ever worked with and Margaret Rutherford said that “working with him is like walking where there’s only sunshine.”

Callow does capture a vivid sense of what made Welles such an exciting force of nature. There are particularly perceptive chapters on the making of Touch Of Evil and Chimes At Midnight in which we read of Welles at his most creative, improvising in the moment, involving actors and crew in every decision and enjoying every possibility of the film medium. Letting go of a film and considering it the finished article was one of the biggest challenges to his restless spirit and maybe suggests why so many Welles projects (including his dream to film Don Quixote) were only half finished or abandoned along the way. There are now so many books on Welles, especially during the year that marks the centenary of his birth, that you suspect there is nothing new to say on the man or to discover about his life. Callow proves that to be a lie. His access to the previously unpublished diaries of two of Welles’s long-suffering secretaries and of the actress Fay Compton gives us an idea of what it was like to stand in the middle of the roaring hurricanes that Welles created. We learn of the insecurities that made acting such an ordeal for Welles, of the regard he held for Pier Paolo Pasolini and of the “tragic pessimism” that Callow believes lies at the root of Welles’ work.

In the closing chapters on the making of Chimes At Midnight, Callow cleverly traces the parallels between Welles and Falstaff from the father figures in his life, to the betrayals, the loss of innocence and the obsession with humiliation. It is the kind of analysis that leaves you hungry to revisit the film and underlines Callow’s abiding sense that there are many riches that lie dotted throughout Welles’ life in the long afterglow of Citizen Kane. One Man Band is a book to savour and one that leaves you once again longing for the next volume in what is proving to be a magnificent response to the most Herculean of biographical tasks.