![]() ![]() ![]() It is the audience who teaches (an actor) to act, and that can take place only in a theatre.” ![]() “Beyond that, I learned that private acting instruction should be prohibited by law. Hickman’s voice lessons were valuable,” he later wrote. He borrowed $150 from a banker uncle and went to Washington, D.C., to study for a year at the Robert Nugent Hickman School of Expression. He did his first acting in high school, and after dropping out, set out to become an actor. “I pedaled a million miles if I pedaled a yard.” “I had the best pair of legs in the world,” Cotten often recalled. ![]() “But as a star,” Welles added, rekindling Cotten’s sinking hopes for his future, “I think you well might hit the jackpot.”īorn in the Virginia peanut center of Petersburg on May 15, 1905, “Jo” Cotten got his first job working for his father, the city superintendent of mails, distributing special delivery mail by bicycle. But these are fringe assets, and I’m afraid you’ll never make it as an actor. You can also move about the stage without running into the furniture. “You’re very lucky to be tall and thin and have curly hair. Needless to say, Cotten was nonplussed when Welles offered this early appraisal: But the irony of the failed film in 1982 was not lost on him, as he wrote in his book: “It was such a disaster that it closed the Music Hall.”īut the dapper, debonair Cotten remained durable throughout, always finding work to support his robust appetites for clothes, travel, women, parties and elaborate homes in London, Los Angeles or Palm Springs. “Mine was a heady beginning in the movies,” Cotten wrote with understatement in his poorly received 1987 autobiography, “Joseph Cotten: Vanity Will Get You Somewhere.” “We made a classic without knowing it.”Īt the other end of his film career, he realized a lifelong thrill in “Heaven’s Gate”-opening at Radio City Music Hall. In 1950, he rejoined Welles the actor in the highly successful international thriller “The Third Man.” To follow in the 1940s were memorable roles in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Shadow of a Doubt,” and “Portrait of Jenny” for which he won the 1950 Venice Film Festival prize for best actor. Cotten’s earliest films were regarded as his best and his best-known, beginning with “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’ thinly veiled biography of William Randolph Hearst in 1941, in which Cotten played Kane’s elderly best friend Jedediah Leland. ![]()
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