Last surviving actor in Citizen Kane

Born: March 18, 1915;

Died: March 6, 2016

KATHRYN Trosper Popper, who has died aged 100, utters one of the most pivotal lines in movie history – “What’s Rosebud?” at the end of Citizen Kane – and yet it was her only piece of acting work.

She was chosen for the role while working as personal assistant to the film’s director Orson Welles and appears at the end of the 1941 film when the newspaper mogul’s possessions are about to be burned. Popper is seen taking pictures and hears a reporter mention the word Rosebud. She asks what it means and the reporter replies “That’s what he said when he died.” The camera then pans to a children’s sledge with the word “Rosebud” on the side just as it goes up in flames.

It was a critical moment in a film which has often been named as the greatest ever made, but it was a curious interlude for Popper, who never worked in films again, despite Welles’ supposed attempts to find a career for in Hollywood.

Born in Hudson, Wyoming, she had first met Welles in 1938 after dropping out of university to find work in an office to help support her parents during the Great Depression. The director offered her a job in the Mercury Theatre division at RKO Studios.

By the early 1940s she was working as his personal assistant and was on set when Citizen Kane was in production. “When I was needed,” she said, “ I would just droop my notebook and run on set. It was all seen as so glamorous but in reality I was a small boat bobbing in a big ocean.”

After her small but significant role in Citizen Kane, any acting career failed to take off and she moved to MGM where she met and married Martin Popper, who was executive secretary of the National Lawyers Guild. He also defended two film writers who were among the famous Hollywood 10 convicted in 1950 of contempt of Congress for refusing to say whether they were Communists. Mr Popper was convicted of the same offence 11 years later, although the conviction was later reversed.

In the years that followed, Popper occasionally talked about her role in Citizen Kane and defended Welles against claims that he had not actually written the film and that he had simply added his name to a script by Herman J Mankiewicz. Faced with the claim, she said “Then I’d like to know what was all that stuff I was typing for Mr Welles.”

Popper was believed to have been the last surviving actor from Citizen Kane. Her brother was also involved in films, writing the screenplays for the Elvis Presley film Jailhouse Rock, Birdman of Alcatraz and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Her husband pre-deceased her and she is survived by her daughter, grandchild and great grandchildren.