For his work in this poignant whimsy, Cotten, the kind of effortless performer who never wins awards, was named Best Actor by the Venice Film Festival.Ĭharacterizations calling for sturdiness found Cotten loving Merle Oberon unrequitedly in 'Lydia' (1941), helping Claudette Colbert through wartime misery in 'Since You Went Away' (1944) and rescuing a victimized Ingrid Bergman in 'Gaslight' (1944). One of his best performances came opposite Jones in William Dieterle's 'Portrait of Jennie' (1948), as a painter involved with a mysterious waif from long ago. A sensitive lead well-suited to romance, Cotten played a shell-shocked soldier on leave tentatively courting prisoner-on-leave Ginger Rogers in 'I'll Be Seeing You' (1944) and his moody poet embraced the amnesiac Jennifer Jones in 'Love Letters' (1945). Delicate work came in his wonderful performance as a rejected inventor in Welles' brilliant follow-up to 'Kane,' the study of family decay 'The Magnificent Ambersons' (1942), and his chillingly ambiguous portrait of a kindly uncle who may be a murderer in Alfred Hitchcock's subtly unnerving 'Shadow of a Doubt' (1943). Older than the conventional new find at age 36, Cotten combined a mature and sometimes cynical pragmatism with an inner idealism either challenged by emotional pressures and social circumstances, or else shown to give way to scheming menace or dangerous rage. Tall, wavy-haired and gentlemanly, with a trace of a Southern drawl and attractive if unconventional features, Cotten developed great versatility during his 1930s stage work which would serve him well in one of the most impressive strings of performances any Hollywood actor achieved in the 40s.

Quietly intense, highly talented member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, a former drama critic who went to Hollywood with the director to act (as a drama critic) in 'Citizen Kane' (1941) and stayed to enjoy success on screen, TV and stage alike over the next four decades.

Shadow of a doubt joseph cotten