Background

Joseph Cotten was born on 15 May 1905 in Petersburg, Virginia, United States.

Career

Cotten was already a star of the stage when drawn to Hollywood by Orson Welles. Since 1930, he had appeared on Broadway in The Postman Always Rings Twice, with Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, and in Accent on Youth. His association with Welles began through the Mercury Theater and Federal Theater Productions. It was perhaps Welles’s slyness to cast Cotten—whose first job in the theatre had been as a reviewer—as the dramatic critic of the Inquirer and the most skeptical admirer of Citizen Kane (41). Ever after, Cotten hardly seemed the master of his own career. In The Magnificent Ambersons (42) he was again utterly convincing as the turned away suitor, not quite up to the proud Ambersons. Cotten also appeared in Lydia (41, Julien Duvivier) and both acted in and wrote that Mercury charade Journey into Fear (43, Norman Foster). From Welles’s influence he passed into the not quite as embracing hands of David Selznick.

Despite Cotten’s disturbingly good performance as the murderous uncle in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (43), Selznick carelessly loaned him out or employed him as orthodox romantic leads for fennifer Jones: thus, the policeman in Gaslight (44, George Cukor); Since You Went Away (44, John Cromwell); I’ll Be Seeing You (44) and Love Letters (45) both for Dieterle; the pale, good brother in Duel in the Sun (46, King Vidor); The Farmer's Daughter (47, H. C. Potter); and the wistful, morbid painter in Portrait of Jennie (49, Dieterle). His talents were briefly revived as the truculent groom-husband in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (49) and, again teased by Welles, as Holly Martins, the gullible American in Vienna, in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (49). After September Affair (50, Dieterle), Two Flags West (50, Robert Wise), and Peking Express (52, Dieterle), he settled increasingly for portrayals of henpecked middle age, as Monroe’s wizened husband in Niagara (53, Henry Hathaway), in Beyond the Forest (49, Vidor), and The Steel Trap (52, Andrew L. Stone). He was more rigorous in Untamed Frontier (52, Hugo Fregonese); Blueprint for Murder (53, Stone); Special Delivery (55, John Brahm); The Bottom of the Bottle (56, Hathaway); The Killer Is Loose (56, Budd Boet- ticher); and The Halliday Brand (57. Joseph H. Lewis).

But he began to take smaller parts in big pictures, like Hush, Hush...Sweet Charlotte (64, Robert Aldrich) and Petulia (68, Dick Lester); as boozed Southern colonels in Italian Westerns; as a surgeon unbelievingly pursued by Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (71, Robert Fuest); the victim in Soylent Green (73. Richard Fleischer) and in A Delicate Balance (75, Tony Richardson); Airport ’77 (77, Jerry Jameson); Twilight’s Last Gleaming (77, Aldrich); Caravans (78, James Fargo); L'Isola degli Uomini Pesce (79, Sergio Martino); Guyana: The Crime of the Century (79, René Cardona Jr.); The House Where Evil Dwells (79, Kevin Connor); The Concorde Affair (79, Ruggero Deodato); The Hearse (80, George Bowen); “Reverend Doctor” at the Harvard graduation in Heavens Gate (80, Michael Cimino); and The Survivor (81, David Hemmings).

Works

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• film

  • The Magnificent Ambersons 1942
  • Citizen Kane 1941
  • Journey Into Fear
  • Shadow of a Doubt 1943
  • Since You Went Away 1944

Personality

Cotten was never quite the romantic star Selznick took him for. His grace and attentiveness were also detached and dreamy, and Hitchcock saw how easily the crinkled face might be made morose. His best performances are in parts outside Hollywood conventions. Cotten was known as a practical joker, and he probably enjoyed testing Welles’s guess at his future in Kme, where Leland is seen as both a youthful idealist and an old man left plotting with his memories and scrounging cigars. But he answered Welles’s call, in 1958, to appear uncredited as the drunken coroner in Touch of Evil.