George Orson Welles
Born in 1915, Orson Welles entered the entertainment business in his twenties and was considered a boy wonder. He began as a theater director and founded the Mercury Theatre, a repertory stage company responsible for several Broadway plays. In 1938, Welles started a radio series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
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He quickly rose to prominence after a convincing radio narration of The War of the Worlds, which caused some listeners to panic as they mistakenly believed that an actual war with extraterrestrials was happening. In December 1938, the show’s name was changed to The Campbell Playhouse after their sponsors- Campbell’s Soup.