Orson Welles' daughter files lawsuit claiming rights to 'Citizen Kane'

The daughter of the late Hollywood actor and director Orson Welles is locked in a legal battle over the lucrative rights to his most admired film, Citizen Kane.

Beatrice Welles is pursuing her case through the district court in San Francisco, which is being asked to decide between two different agreements signed by Welles, who died in 1985. He entered into a contract in 1939 to write, produce and star in Citizen Kane, which was released two years later, and in the 1942 film, The Magnificent Ambersons.

According to details of the lawsuit reported yesterday, a later agreement between Welles and the RKO film company in 1944 terminated the earlier contract and restored the copyrights to Welles.

Ms Welles is asking for a decision from the court on which of the contracts applies – with the Welles family due to gain whatever the ruling.

If the 1944 agreement stands, then her family, as Welles' heirs, own the rights to both movies. But even if that is ruled invalid and the court upholds the earlier contract, it is claimed that the family would be contractually entitled to 20 per cent of the profits from the two movies.

The sums of money involved are likely to be substantial. Citizen Kane, the story of a newspaper magnate that was made by Welles when he was 25 years old, has been consistently voted by assorted polls the most important or best film of all time.

It dazzled critics and cinema audiences when it was first released with its hitherto unknown use of mock- documentary footage and overlapping dialogue.

The legal action is not the first time that the Welles family has found itself locked in a contractual dispute. Last year Beatrice Welles was reported to have blocked an attempt by Oja Kodar, a former girlfriend of her father, to gain a cinema release for The Other Side of the Wind, the project Welles was working on when he died.

Ms Kodar claimed that she had been left the rights to all of Welles' unseen films in his will. But Ms Welles was understood to believe that United States' copyright laws made her the rightful owner and that she was responsible for her father's estate.