Joseph Cotten

He wrote the screenplay with the help of Welles (who produced the film), and starred in the film with Dolores del Río. By the time production wrapped, Welles had been dropped from RKO, and, as part of the settlement, was required to edit the film to suitable length. The film was a minor hit, but the two friends did not collaborate professionally during the next six years.

In The Third Man (1949), Cotten portrays a writer of pulp fiction who travels to post-war Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime (Welles). When he arrives, he discovers that Lime has died, and is determined to prove to the police that it was murder, but uncovers an even darker secret.

The characters that he played onscreen during this period ranged from a serial killer in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943, opposite Teresa Wright) to an eager police detective in Gaslight (1944, with Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Angela Lansbury in her film debut). Cotten starred with Jennifer Jones in four films: the wartime domestic drama Since You Went Away (1944), the romantic drama Love Letters (1945), the western Duel in the Sun (1946), and the critically acclaimed Portrait of Jennie (1948), in which he played a melancholy artist who becomes obsessed with a girl who may have died many years ago. He reunited with Hitchcock at the end of the decade in Under Capricorn (1949) as an Australian land-owner with a shady past. Read Less