Orson Welles

He is...the Most Interesting Man in the World!

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915–October 10, 1985) was the voice of Unicron in The Transformers: The Movie. He was born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin and in 1938 he convinced a bunch of rubes that Martians were invading the Earth with his War of the Worlds radio show. He also made some movie about some guy who wants a sled.

It wasn't until 1985 that Mr. Welles finally fulfilled his true destiny by playing the planet-gobbling world Unicron, although, sadly, Mr. Welles died before the movie was released in 1986.

"You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen."

―Orson Welles

"The irony of [Welles] playing a planet-sized eating machine wasn't lost on anyone."

―Michael McConnohie

Notes

• Apparently, Mr. Welles was tough to work with. He didn't take voice direction very well, and his first viewing of the script was on the day he came in to record his lines. His voice was also very weak, so the voice you hear in the movie is Welles' voice run through a synthesizer.

External links

• Orson Welles at the Internet Movie Database
• Find-A-Grave
• California Death Records
• Orson Welles's finest moment
• Orson Welles's even finer moment