Orson Welles came to Hollywood having soared to prominence as a producer of stage and radio. Given carte blanche by George J. Schaefer, president of RKO studios, Welles was determined to create something highly personal for his film debut. He had considered and reluctantly discarded an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and been forced to abandon a project based on Nicholas Blake's The Smiler With a Knife, owing to the aversion of Carole Lombard and Rosalind Russell - the film's potential stars - to working with an untried director.

Undeterred, Welles decided that he would play the lead in an original story, Citizen Kane (1940), concorted by Herman Mankiewicz and himself. Despite the risks involved, Schaefer stood by Welles and turned over the resources of his studio to him. But prior to release, the film ran into unexpected problems. Louella O. Parsons, head of the movie department of Hearst's newspaper empire, had been one of the first to view the film and had complained to Hearst that Citizen Kane's story was nothing but an unflattering version of Hearst's liaison with his mistress, Marion Davies. The Hearst newspapers refused to run advertisements for the film. As a result, Citizen Kane did not have a nationwide release and some cinemas even cancelled their bookings. In spite of a number of intelligent and enthusiastic reviews, it was not the runaway box-office hit the studios had hoped for.

RKO was concerned, therefore, about Welles' second venture, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), a film version of Booth Tarkington's novel, which was already in production. Welles did not act in The Magnificent Ambersons, preferring to concentrate his talents on directing the picture. He was thoroughly conversant with his material; in 1939 he had played the part of the unsympathetic young hero, George Amberson Minafer, on the radio. He cast Tim Holt in this role for the film and devoted all his energies to re-creating a nostalgic picture of American life in the nineteenth century.

To those few who were lucky enough to see the sneak preview of the completed film at the United Artists Theatre in Pasadena, The Magnificent Ambersons was a stunning, never-to-be- forgotten event, in every way as important cinematically as Citizen Kane. However, the film was sent back to the editing room as the studio felt further cutting was necessary.

Welles was meanwhile staggering production on two films, Journey Into Fear (1942) - a version of the Eric Ambler novel, which Welles was directing with Norman Foster and also acting in - and a semi-documentary about South America made with the cooperation of the US government, It's All True.

The worst thing that could have happened to Welles' career in Hollywood then hit with the suddenness of a Californian earthquake: Schaefer, Welles' sponsor, was replaced as head of production at RKO by Charles J. Koerner, a man who knew how to distribute and exhibit movies, had great taste, but no patience with failure at the box-office. Welles, busy shooting in South America, was summarily fired, and all the film he had shot for It's All True was deposited in the RKO vaults where it remained until June 1978 when a portion of it was shown for the first time.

On July 1. 1942, The Magnificent Ambersons, a third of its original length edited out - and with it much of its bitter-sweet drama - opened in Los Angeles as part of a double bill with a 'programmer' called Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (1942). The Hollywood career of Orson Welles seemed to have ground to a halt: he was regarded as an expensive eccentric.

When Journey Into Fear was released it had been even more mangled by RKO's editors than The Magnificent Ambersons. Wisely, Welles left Hollywood. His name had been linked with the beautiful Dolores Del Rio, but when she saw what remained of her work in Journey Into Fear, she threw up her hands in despair and returned to her native Mexico.

When Welles returned to Hollywood, he did so solely as an actor. He was cast in Jane Eyre (1943) as the moody Mr Rochester, who conceals his insane wife in the attic of his house. The production had been set up by David 0. Selznick and then sold with two other potential Selznick productions (Claudia, 1943, and Keys to the Kingdom, 1944) to 20th Century-Fox because Selznick desperately needed ready money. Selznick had set up Robert Stevenson as director of Jane Eyre, and he had supervised the script prepared by Aldous Huxley and the production designs of William Pereira. From the beginning, Jane Eyre was to star Joan Fontaine; the role of Rochester had been styled for an older actor, such as Ronald Colman. Colman, however, was ill, and another candidate, Laurence Olivier, was in war service for his own country. Welles was an unexpected choice for the part, but was approved by all concerned. His Rochester was young and handsome, and he played the character with great theatrical bombast. Colman and Olivier might have chosen to act the part with more subtlety, but Welles invested it with a romantic fury, more closely akin to another Bronte hero - Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

Jane Eyre was well received, and Welles had no difficulty getting other acting roles. He was believable in a mysterious soap-opera romance, Tomorrow Is Forever, playing opposite Claudette Colbert, and he was even allowed to direct The Stranger (both 1946), in which he played the lead - a Nazi war criminal attempting to conceal his murky past. He, however. never thought much of that picture.

In 1947 he directed his wife Rita Hayworth (they had married in 1943) in The Lady From Shanghai, an exotic melodrama - now regarded as a classic - that at the time attracted a small coterie of admirers. They chose to disregard Louella Parsons when she named Welles 'awesome Orson, the self-styled genius' and informed fans that he was not only 'washed up' in Hollywood, but was finished as Rita's husband. She was right in her latter accusation, for Hayworth and Welles soon divorced, Miss Hayworth declaring:

'I can't take his genius any more'