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“This is a testament to the popularity of Orson Welles and his magnum opus Citizen Kane,” said Nate D. Saunders, owner of the auction house, in a statement.
The Oscar has a story worthy of a Hollywood movie in its own right. Welles had lost it, but it resurfaced after his 1985 death when it was put up for auction in 1994 by a cinematographer, who claimed Welles had given it to him as a form of payment.
Welles’s daughter Beatrice sued and won back ownership of the statue, but she was sued in turn by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives out the awards, when she tried to auction it in 2003.
After a legal battle, Beatrice Welles was given the right to dispose of the Oscar. She sold it to a California non-profit organization called the Dax Foundation, who tried unsuccessfully to auction it in 2007.
In a bid to stop public sales, the Academy in 1950 introduced an agreement that banned winners from selling their Oscars to anyone but the Academy for the nominal sum of $ 1.
But several pre-1950s Oscars have gone under the hammer in recent years, including the best picture Oscar for the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind,” which was sold for a record $ 1.54 million in 1999 to Michael Jackson.