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She was born in 1930 to an Italian aristocratic family. By 1953, she had begun carving out a career for herself as a film actress, playing supporting roles in several Italian films.
In 1953 Mori met Orson Welles, and the two began a romance. The following year he cast her in the female lead of his film Mr. Arkadin. The couple had a "shotgun wedding" after Welles impregnated Mori, and Mori's Catholic parents feared for their family's reputation if the two did not marry. They were wed in London on 8 May 1955, and their daughter Beatrice Welles was born in New York on 13 November 1955, six months later.
After the re
She was born in 1930 to an Italian aristocratic family. By 1953, she had begun carving out a career for herself as a film actress, playing supporting roles in several Italian films.
In 1953 Mori met Orson Welles, and the two began a romance. The following year he cast her in the female lead of his film Mr. Arkadin. The couple had a "shotgun wedding" after Welles impregnated Mori, and Mori's Catholic parents feared for their family's reputation if the two did not marry. They were wed in London on 8 May 1955, and their daughter Beatrice Welles was born in New York on 13 November 1955, six months later.
After the release of Mr. Arkadin in 1955, she was stung by the wave of negative reviews of her performance (in which her voice had been dubbed by Billie Whitelaw, to conceal her strong Italian accent), and once she was married to Welles, she acted in only a handful of her husband's projects, and then withdrew from acting altogether. By 1962, the couple were effectively living separate lives. Film historian Andrew J. Rausch writes, "the couple was estranged from the mid-1960s through [to] Welles's death in 1985, but they never divorced." According to Gary Graver, one of Welles' closest friends and collaborators for the last 15 years of his life, "She never paid any attention to him. Orson said that Paola refused to divorce him. He said that there were two reasons for this: (1) she was Catholic and the Catholics looked down on divorce and (2) she wanted to be Mrs. Orson Welles."
From 1966 onwards, Welles divided his time between a home with Mori and their daughter, and a home with his long-term mistress Oja Kodar, but Mori and Kodar never met in his lifetime. Welles was also an infrequent presence at the home with Mori, citing the demands of work. Although British tabloids reported his affair with Kodar as early as 1969 (which was a factor in his moving permanently to the United States in 1970), both Mori and Beatrice remained oblivious as to Kodar's existence until 1984. In the 1970s, Welles set up a home with Mori and Beatrice in the United States, first in Sedona, Arizona, then in Las Vegas, Nevada, ostensibly because the climate would be good for his asthma. But while they lived in Nevada, he spent most of his time in Los Angeles, where he openly shared a house with Kodar. When Mori found out about Kodar in 1984, she threw Welles out of their Nevada house, and she and Beatrice did not see him for the last year of his life, although they still talked regularly on the telephone. Their daughter Beatrice states: "They sort of separated toward the end because he had a girlfriend. My mother found out about it, and he denied it. She told him he could come back home as soon as he stopped lying to her. He didn't come home during that last year of his life, but he and my mother talked on the phone every day."
This situation had serious ramifications for the copyright status of Welles's work after his death. Welles left Kodar his Los Angeles home and the rights to his unfinished films, and turned the rest over to Mori. Mori contended that she should have been left everything, and a year after Welles's death, Mori and Kodar finally agreed on the settlement of his will. On the way to their meeting to sign the papers, however, Mori was killed in a car accident in Las Vegas on August 12, 1986. Mori's half of the estate was inherited by Beatrice, who refused to come to an arrangement with Kodar, who she blames for undermining her parents' marriage. Legal wranglings between the two have persisted for over 25 years, leading to complex ongoing legal battles over who owns Welles's unfinished films - legal action by Beatrice has at least three times prevented Welles's last film, The Other Side of the Wind, from being completed, and Beatrice launched legal action to try to stop a re-release of Welles' Touch of Evil in 1998 without paying royalties to her (even though the film was wholly owned by Universal Studios, and at no time was Welles due to receive royalties), and also filing an ongoing lawsuit attempting to seek over 60 years of accumulated royalties for Citizen Kane (even though, again, Welles did not own that film, nor did his contract ever entitle him to any royalties). In support of that claim, Beatrice has filed a lawsuit against the British Film Institute when they tried to screen that film in 2004, causing the screening to be cancelled. She has also threatened to sue companies seeking to release or screen her father's favourite of his films, Chimes at Midnight.
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