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Joseph Cotten
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Self-effacing to the point of never drawing attention away from his healthy-egoed leading ladies, Joseph Cotten was an indispensable part of forties romantic hagiography. When Cotten stared soulfully at a woman, his eyes revealed a man consumed by his feelings—not to the point of traditional derring-do or fancy declarations of love, but to the level of psychological breakdown. The term lovesick could have been coined for him. With the burgeoning fascination with psychoanalysis (given impetus by Spellbound), Freudians could study Cotten as the era's prime symbol of emotional defeat and sublimation. If only one of his roles (I'll Be Seeing You) featured an actual victim of shell-shock, many of his other opuses (Love Letters, Since You Went Away, The Magnificent Ambersons, Portrait of Jennie) could be considered studies of a love-shocked martyr in thrall to elusive women on pedestals. That above list includes some of the period's most winsome classics and one masterpiece, Welles's studio-mauled Ambersons, in which Cotten loses his lady fair while regretting the progress he has implemented, aware that his mechanical forward-strides have destroyed his beloved Isabelle's family.
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Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) is a penniless painter, living hand to mouth in a boarding house and struggling with his inspiration. He finds a valuable ally in gallery owner Miss Spinney (Ethel Barrymore); but it's not until he meets a mysterious girl called Jennie Appleton (Jennifer Jones) that he begins to achieve true success. Painting Jennie's portrait becomes his main goal, but the situation becomes complicated as Jennie seems to get older each time she visits. Their friendship turns into love, but will Eben ever accept that Jennie's fate is already sealed?
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Joseph Cotten's distinctive voice and his acting ability had made him a star on stage and radio before he came to Hollywood. Blessed with good looks, charm, and a soft Southern drawl, he was bound for success in Tinseltown when he made his debut in Citizen Kane.
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In this Cold War spy classic, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a third-rate American pulp novelist, arrives in postwar Vienna, where he has been promised a job by his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Upon his arrival, Martins discovers that Lime has been killed in a traffic accident, and that his funeral is taking place immediately. At the graveside, Martins meets outwardly affable Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and actress Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), who is weeping copiously. When Calloway tells Martins that the late Harry Lime was a thief and murderer, the loyal Martins is at first outraged. Gradually, he discovers not only that Calloway was right but ... that the man lying in the coffin in the film's early scenes was not Harry Lime at all--and that Lime is still very much alive (he was the mysterious "third man" at the scene of the fatal accident). Thus the stage is set for the movie's famous climactic confrontation in the sewers of Vienna--and the even more famous final shot, in which Martins pays emotionally for doing "the right thing."
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From All Movie Guide: 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 rejoinedWelles 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.
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Joseph Cotten was born on May 15, 1905 in Petersburg, Virginia. In 1930, he started his acting career on Broadway. In 1937, he joined Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. After starring in several Mercury Theater productions, he went back to Broadway in 1939. But in 1941, he got his first real taste of Hollywood when he co-starred in a movie with his old friend, Orson Welles. The film was "Citizen Kane."
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Joseph Cotten