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Joseph Cotten: Orson Welles
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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}.
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Born in Petersburg, Virginia, Cotten worked as an advertising agent after graduating from the Washington, D.C., Hickman School, where he studied acting. His work as a theatre critic inspired him to become more involved in theatre productions, first in Virginia, and later in New York. Cotten made his Broadway debut in 1930, and soon befriended up-and-coming actor/director/producer Orson Welles. In 1937, he joined Welles' Mercury Theatre Company, starring in productions of Julius Caesar and Shoemaker's Holiday.
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Sadly, for a career that includes the superb postwar thriller The Third Man and roles or cameos in five Welles classics, Cotten seemed to give up on stardom with the same lack of coyness his characters suffered from. He was lucky to average two good movies a decade from the fifties onward. In addition to a memorable appearance as the Reverend Doctor failing to inspire a graduating class in Heaven's Gate, Cotten was supremely swinish as a greedy plotter in Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and stomach-churningly class conscious as an overprotective father in Petulia. Perhaps it is merciful to overlook those decades of perfectly intoned line deliveries that he palmed off as performances and concentrate on his glory days as a luckless Lothario forever reaching for the unattainable woman. Falling short or pulling fatefully back, Cotten is remembered as the hero-in-stasis, a man whose goodness ultimately proved ineffective in his pursuit of happiness.
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The last collaboration with Welles is widely considered as Cotten's best performance. In The Third Man, Cotten portrays a writer of pulp fiction who travels to post-war Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime (Welles). When he arrives, he discovers that Lime has died, and is determined to prove to the police that it was murder, but uncovers an even darker secret. The film proved to be another technical achievement, but Cotten was passed over come Academy night.
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