Oscar That Orson Welles Won for Citizen Kane Screenplay Goes Under Hammer

The Oscar statuette presented to Orson Welles for Citizen Kane, the film that regularly tops polls of the best of all time, was going on sale in New York last night.

The Oscar was expected to fetch up to $1.2m (£590,000) for the charitable foundation that owns it. Oscars are rarely sold. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presents the awards each year, is highly protective of its cachet, and requires nominees to sign an agreement "not to sell or otherwise dispose of" the statuette, should they win.

Welles received his Oscar for Citizen Kane in 1942, nine years before the ruling took effect. He also did not join the Academy, so was not subject to its regulations.

Many Hollywood figures have lobbied to keep statuettes in the hands of the Academy. In previous Oscar auctions, director Steven Spielberg has bought on behalf of the Academy statuettes that once belonged to Clark Gable and Bette Davis.

"We've had a tremendous amount of interest from very high-profile individuals who have said that they would like to see this on their mantel or back in the Academy's hands," Dave Weisman, executive director of the Dax Foundation, which owns the statuette, said.

But the history of this statuette makes it special, and suggests that Welles would have had little truck with the decorum demanded by the guardians of Hollywood history.

While the film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, it won just one, for best original screenplay, shared by Welles and Herman Mankiewicz. Welles, who had fallen out with the Academy, did not attend the ceremony, and each time his name was read out it was greeted with boos and hisses.

At some point, Welles lost the statuette, probably during his later life when he spent years living as a house guest of various Hollywood acquaintances. After his death in 1985, his daughter, Beatrice, obtained a replacement from the Academy. But in 1994 the original surfaced at an auction at Sotheby's, which is handling this week's sale. The statuette had been in the possession of Welles's cinematographer, Gary Graver, who said the director had given it to him as a gift.

Welles's daughter sued to stop the sale and gain ownership of the statuette, pledging that it would feature in a permanent memorial to her father. Instead she sold the statuette three years later, fending off a lawsuit from the Academy seeking to block the sale. The statuette was bought in 2003 by the Dax Foundation.

Last night's sale also featured the Oscar-winning script by Welles and Mankiewicz. The 156-page document was expected to fetch $120,000.