Cotten, Joseph (1905–1994)

US actor. Brought into films by the director Orson Welles, he gave outstanding performances in Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and The Third Man (1949). Intelligent and low-key, he also played a sardonic serial killer in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

Cotten was not conventionally handsome, but his air of rugged intelligence and his distinctively husky voice lent him a strong screen presence, although his days as a top-rank star proved relatively brief.

Cotten was born in Virginia. He moved to New York in the early 1930s and joined Welles's and John Houseman's Mercury Theater in 1937, becoming one of its mainstays on stage and radio. In 1939 he left to appear with Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, a big hit on the Broadway stage. He was often cast for romantic appeal, notably in Portrait of Jennie (1948). The role of a hard-up pulp writer in The Third Man (1949) brought out Cotten's capacity for rueful humour. By the mid-1950s he ceased to win leading roles but continued to play secondary parts in a number of films. One of his last screen roles was in Heaven's Gate (1980). He published an autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, in 1987.