When Steven Spielberg was the new kid on the Hollywood block he took his hero Orson Welles out to lunch, during which he was treated to a lecture on restraint from the famously gluttonous great man. The entire budget for Citizen Kane, he was told, barely reached the technicians’ overtime bill on the recently completed Jaws.

Spielberg pretended to be suitably chastened, and later bought the original Rosebud sledge from Kane for $55,000. Nevertheless neither he, nor the other Hollywood young bloods, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who habitually cited Welles as their inspiration, ever stepped in with the cash. Such was Welles’s genius for improvisation and making do, it would not have taken much to allow him to finish his last projects, including The Other Side of the Wind, which he was still working on at the time of his death in 1985.

It’s time we changed our view of Welles, stopped seeing him as a self-indulgent wastrel, and more as a victim of all that is worst about the entertainment business. An untaught genius (the obscure expressionist sources that critics find for his films are just nonsense), Welles was betrayed by the art form that he helped to revolutionise. I hope our play helps to put the record straight.

Critics and audiences have been very good to Rosebud, directed by Josh Richards, and I want to put on record that any passion or energy in my performance as Welles in Mark Jenkins’ play stems from my anger.

Having immersed myself in his life, it infuriates me that the man behind some of the greatest films ever made should have been reduced to this awkward, exiled and in some ways grotesque figure. These at least are the dominant attributes of the image of Welles that I formed in my youth; this gravel-voiced monolith, fatter even than Pavarotti, lending his great gravelly voice to advertisements for frozen peas, sherry and dog food on television.

Faced with this spectacle, who could argue with the conventional wisdom that Welles made a Faustian pact, exchanging his soul and his extraordinary talent for easy lucre.

I hope that Mark’s play is helping to change this erroneous perception. I must have read about 50 books on Welles’s life and only a handful really get the point about him, which was not that he lost his integrity but that he kept it to the end.

If he really was careless of his integrity he would have stayed in Hollywood and jumped through the hoops that the studio bosses demanded. Instead he continued to try and make the kind of films he wanted to make, in reduced circumstances.

The legendary theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay once noted that talent was actually quite common, it’s the character needed to nurture and protect the talent that is so rare. Welles, who made what is usually seen as the greatest film of all time at the age of 24, must be classed in a special group where talent is concerned. But I would argue that he looked after that talent far better than is usually maintained by those who see his career as a long decline from his debut.

Welles’s critics have plenty of ammunition when they claim that he brought about his own fall from grace through self-indulgence. Welles always had a huge appetite and even at the time of Citizen Kane (1941) he was wearing a truss to keep his figure in check. His dressing room was strewn with empty caviar jars and champagne bottles.

It was not just food. Even when he was married to Rita Hayworth, the most beautiful woman in the world at the time, he was having affairs with Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. This is why Falstaff was one of his greatest performances; in food as in sex, he ate life up. Richard Burton, who is a perfect example of a real Faustian figure, looked at him with some gorgeous stick insect and snapped: “How on earth does he make love?”

Certainly Welles was adept at inspiring what must have been considerable kindness from his ladies, but when people start habitually comparing you to a melting iceberg or a volcano, you have a problem being taken seriously as an artist.

There was heartbreaking sadness I think in the image of him wandering the hotel lobbies of the world, instigating thousands of different projects that would never reach fruition.

Times Recommends

• What makes the perfect mum?
• To keep me stress-free, no more awareness days, please
• What do lottery winners buy?