By RAY KELLY
Kathryn Trosper Popper, who served as Orson Welles’ personal assistant on Citizen Kane and had a bit role in the landmark film, has died. She was 100.
She appeared in Citizen Kane in an uncredited role as a news photographer, uttering the lines, “What’s Rosebud?” and “Yeah, all in crates,” her daughter, Dr. Laura Popper, recalled in a moving Facebook posting. She died on Monday, just 11 days before 101st birthday.
A coal miner’s daughter, the Wyoming native attended USC on a scholarship and was a court stenographer before she joined the secretarial pool at RKO Pictures, which produced Citizen Kane in 1941.
After Pauline Kael made her baseless claim in the 1971 essay Raising Kane that Welles did not co-write Citizen Kane, Trosper Popper remarked to director Peter Bogdanovich, “Then I’d like to know, what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr. Welles?”
Trosper Popper was an eyewitness to the collaboration between Welles and Herman Mankiewicz on the script for the film. She cooperated with Harlan Lebo for his book Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey and Robert Caringer’s groundbreaking essay The Scripts of Citizen Kane.
Carringer wrote, “There was constant interchange between (Mankiewicz in) Victorville and Hollywood, with (John) Houseman going in to confer on the script and Welles sending up emissaries and regularly receiving copies of the work in progress. Welles in turn was working over the draft pages with the assistance of his own secretary, Katherine Trosper, and handing the revised screenplay copy in its rough state over to Amalia Kent, a script supervisor at RKO.”
Trosper Popper was interviewed by NewsBeat Social on the occasion of her 100th birthday in 2015 and recalled juggling duties as an assistant and actress in the film.
She was predeceased by her husband, a prominent lawyer known for defending those accused of communist sympathies during the “Red Scare” of the early 1950s.
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