The Duke playing Genghis Khan in yellowface, filming on a nuclear testing ground? Chris Bell on why nobody escaped the fallout from The Conqueror

Towards the end of his life, Howard Hughes – the billionaire tycoon, aviator and filmmaker – had become a recluse. Locked in the penthouse suite at his Xanadu Princess Resort hotel in the Bahamas, he refused to bathe, cut his nails or hair, use a toilet or even open the curtains.

Instead, he would sit for hours in his darkened bedroom, naked except for a pink hotel napkin, eating nothing but chocolate bars and chicken, surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes that he continuously stacked and rearranged.

But another ritual obsession would come dominate his final few months in 1976: two movies, played continually via a projector on the wall, that he watched over and over again. The first was his favourite film, Ice Station Zebra – Rock Hudson’s tense 1968 spy thriller set in the Arctic. Aides would later recount that Hughes watched it over 150 times.