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Beatrice Welles, the youngest daughter of the late Orson Welles , is putting more than 70 of his personal belongings on the auction block, including including a movie camera, scripts for The Magnificent Ambersons and photos from the set of Citizen Kane.
She told the Associated Press she discovered the items in boxes and trunks last year and decided to put them up for auction. She said her father would have preferred making the memorabilia available to film buffs and fans as opposed to sending them to a museum.
Heritage Auctions will stage the auction on April 26.
According to his daughter, he used the Bell & Howell camera for home movies. A photograph shows Welles using the camera to record a bullfight in Spain.
The two scripts for The Magnificent Ambersons reportedly reveal two different endings Welles had in mind; neither ended up in the film.
Nearly 30 years after Welles’ 1985 death, Beatrice Welles said she was finally emotionally strong enough to sift through boxes of her famous father’s possessions. Her mother, Italian actress Paola Mori, died less than year after Welles. The double loss was devastating.
“When they died … I just couldn’t even look at the stuff,” she told the AP.
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