For months he has kept out of the public eye, his former star status languishing under a cloud of notoriety following numerous allegations of sexual assault.

But now Kevin Spacey has broken cover, and in some style, to take part in a very pointed poetry reading about a wounded performer determined not to succumb to the blows he endures.

Spacey appeared in front of the Greek statue Boxer at Rest in Rome, to read Gabriele Tinti’s poem The Boxer, about an exhausted fighter used for entertainment then left bleeding by the ringside.

The poem contains the lines: "They used me for their entertainment, fed on shoddy stuff. Life was over in a moment” and “The more you're wounded the greater you are. And the more empty you are. I have endured no end of sleepless nights. I have spent hours and hours sweating to destroy and fall”.

Standing beside the Greek bronze cast of the ravaged fighter, which dates from around 316 BC, Spacey, dressed in a tobacco-coloured suit, intoned the poem to a startled audience at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme.