JOSEPH COTTEN - AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED 03/11/1966 - HFSID 251720

JOSEPH COTTEN
Joseph Cotten writes regarding the return of a Faulkner film to The University of Mississippi
Autograph Letter Signed: "Jo", 1¼p, 5¾x8¾. No place, but Pacific Palisades, California, 1966 March 11. On stationery imprinted with his name to Ken Murray, Beverly Hills, California. In full: "The University of Miss. keeps pestering me to return the Faulkner film, which I mistook as a gift from them instead of a loan. Incidentally, think of how many friends we have lost over the years because of that same bitter mistake. Anyway, Ben Irwin's office will pick it up some day convenient to you. He'll call first. Patricia is once more out of the hospital, and happily on the mend, and we look forward to seeing you again in the very near future." Mid-horizontal fold touches the lower portion of signature. Fine condition. With original envelope, return address imprinted on back flap, addressed by Cotton to: "Mr. Ken Murray,/942 N. Alpine,/Beverly Hills,/California." Lightly creased. Soiled at blank area above address. In the year he wrote this letter, Cotten appeared on the big screen in The Money Trap, In Saigon: Some May Live and The Oscar and in the "spaghetti Western", Gli Uonimi dal Passo Pesante (U.S. title, The Tramplers). Patricia was his second wife, the former Patricia Medina, whom he had married in 1960 following the death of his first wife, Lenore Kipp. Actor JOSEPH COTTEN (1905-1994) made his Broadway debut in 1930, and seven years later joined Orson Welles' progressive Mercury Theatre company. He briefly left Welles in 1939 to co-star in Katharine Hepburn's Broadway comeback vehicle The Philadelphia Story. Cotten rejoined Welles in Hollywood in 1940, making his feature-film debut in Citizen Kane (1941). A firmly established romantic lead by the early 1940s, he occasionally stepped outside his established screen image to play murderers (Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, 1943) and surly drunkards (Under Capricorn, 1949). Cotten won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance in Portrait of Jennie (1948). He later flourished on television as a guest performer on such anthologies as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Fireside Theatre and The Great Adventure, and as host of The 20th Century-Fox Hour (1955), The Joseph Cotten Show (1956), On Trial (1959) and Hollywood and the Stars (1963). Multitalented entertainer KEN MURRAY (1903-1988) was a vaudevillian, actor, and radio and television entertainer who had hosted The Ken Murray Show, an hour-long variety show on Saturday nights on CBS (1950-1952). He also hosted a long-running stage variety show in Los Angeles. Two items.