Orson Welles, 1927 | Image: Wikipedia
Celebrated director Orson Welles was known for films such as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai. Yet in spite of Welles' success, he had a complex about one of his physical characteristics: his nose. He was once quoted as saying that his nose had not "grown one millimeter since infancy."
Welles, also an actor, cast himself in a number of his own films. In order to hide what he thought was an embarrassingly tiny nose, for every movie in which he made an appearance, he wore a prosthetic. As Welles grew older, his prosthetic noses did not. He reportedly had at least one new nose for every film, each bigger than the last.
Once, Welles' prosthetic nose collection held up a shoot when it didn't arrive in Hong Kong by mail as planned. Sources on the set reported that a panicked Orson Welles dispatched 20 members of the film crew to every post office in Hong Kong to find his precious package. Editors later reported that Welles' noses changed in shape from scene to scene.
Read other strange stories about film directors including George Lucas, Wes Anderson and James Cameron here.
On the web site Shadowplay there is a fascinating anecdote by David Cairns about Welles’ nose collection: “Each new snout would be hand-crafted by studio artists to the actor’s exacting specifications, and at the end of filming would go into Welles’ private collection. Each nose therein had its own display case and its own name, although the names did not correspond to the names of the characters the noses were designed for. Sheriff Hank Quinlan’s bloated drunkard’s schnozz, for instance, was named Sandra, for instance. The aquiline hooter worn in his television King Lear, made by cutting the corner from a shoebox, went by the nickname Sloane Jnr. On social evenings, Welles would perform magic tricks with the noses, making them vanish, or performing a variation on the old shell game, using three noses and a garden pea.”