Joseph Cotten Movies
Born to a well-to-do Southern family,
Joseph Cotten studied at the Hickman School of Expression in Washington D.C., and later sought out theater jobs in New York. He made his Broadway debut in 1930, and seven years later joined
Orson Welles' progressive Mercury Theatre company, playing leads in such productions as Julius Caesar and Shoemaker's Holiday. He briefly left
Welles in 1939 to co-star in
Katharine Hepburn's Broadway comeback vehicle
The Philadelphia Story.
Cotten rejoined
Welles in Hollywood in 1940, making his feature-film debut as Jed Leland in
Welles'
Citizen Kane (1941). As a sort of private joke, Jed Leland was a dramatic critic, a profession which
Cotten himself had briefly pursued on the Miami Herald in the late '20s.
Cotten went on to play the kindly auto mogul Eugene Morgan in
Welles'
The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, and both acted in and co-wrote
Journey Into Fear, the film that
Welles was working on when he was summarily fired by RKO.
Cotten remained a close friend of
Welles until the director's death in 1985; he co-starred with
Welles in
Carol Reed's
The Third Man (1949) and played an unbilled cameo for old times' sake in the
Welles-directed
Touch of Evil (1958). A firmly established romantic lead by the early '40s,
Cotten occasionally stepped outside his established screen image to play murderers (
Alfred Hitchcock's
Shadow of a Doubt [1943]) and surly drunkards (
Under Capricorn [1949]). A longtime contractee of
David O. Selznick,
Cotten won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance in
Selznick's
Portrait of Jennie (1948).
Cotten's screen career flagged during the 1950s and '60s, though he flourished on television as a guest performer on such anthologies as
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Fireside Theatre, The Great Adventure, and as host of
The 20th Century-Fox Hour (1955), The Joseph Cotten Show (1956), On Trial (1959), and Hollywood and the Stars (1963). He also appeared in several stage productions, often in the company of his second wife, actress
Patricia Medina. In 1987,
Cotten published his engagingly candid autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere. He died of pneumonia in 1994 at the age of 88. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
