Felix In Hollywood

A Blog for the Smart Set

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

The Mystery Gets Revealed.



Ya gotta get up pretty early in the morning.......


Despite my misleading clue, many got this one.  I'd said, "It is perhaps fitting that he's in a sailor middy"



That's because sailor suits were made of cotton!  Joseph Cotten!  (alright, not great, but I was having a bad day)


George W. Tush seemed to be on to me, but Norma (otherwise known around here as 'she who gives gifts') was the first to correctly log the name!!!




Joseph Cheshire Cotten of Petersburg, Va. was born in 1905.  He first tread the boards on Broadway in 1930 but by 1939 he would create the role of C.K. Dexter Haven opposite Kate Hepburn's Tracy Lord in that stage debut of The Philadelphia Story.

While age 36 may be a bit, shall we say, long in the tooth to get your first Hollywood feature, it does help that it's a co-starring role in what many have called the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane.

Cotten enjoyed a 40 year film career and spent the last 15 years of his life in happy retirement before his death in 1994.

The character of Martha in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf refers to him as "modest Joseph Cotten", but I've never regarded him as that.  In fact, despite the wide variety of characters that he played, (particularly in his heyday) I've always thought of him more in the 'creepy/scary/sexy/dangerous' category.

And there may be a clue behind that!  His second screen appearance was in a 1938 short film.  It's title......"Too Much Johnson".

3 comments:

normadesmond said...

sadly, this writer's memory is no longer useful, but i did read (not all that long ago) a blurb about cotton at a hollywood party and his homophobic rant.

i rarely guess mysteries, but that kid's face screamed cotton to me. his hair confused me though. his was so wiry as an adult and that youthful shot shows quite the opposite.

maybe he was a closet case & that stress led to the kinking of his hair, bowels and whatever else may bend.

The Cool Cookie said...

You know, I never considered him a movie star. To me, he's more like filler, even when he got star billing.

Marie said...

The middy hint fooled me, I thought it was Errol Flynn.

I have always loved Joseph Cotten. I developed a real crush on him when I saw him in Portrait of Jennie. He was great in The Third Man and Gaslight. Disappointing to think he was homophobic. :( I thought I had read somewhere he was a really nice, intelligent person. Wishful thinking I guess.