5 Top Memorable Movie Debuts During Hollywood's Golden Age

Most actors, even many we associate with superstardom, started out as extras or bit players -- often in forgettable films -- then garnered leading parts in movies that may or may not have been very good before eventually hitting it big. But a lucky few came on the scene in style with starring or other major roles in classic films. Here's a fortunate fivesome:

Joseph Cotten: Jed Leland, Citizen Kane

Cotten, one of the luckiest of actors, befriended a precocious fellow performer named Orson Welles at an audition for a radio show. Five years later, when Welles was given the chance to produce, direct, cowrite, and star in a movie, he cast Cotten as the journalist friend of newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane in what many people agree is the greatest film ever made -- and it's to Cotten's acting credit that people actually noticed him next to Welles. He joined Welles again for The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear (and small parts in Othello and Touch of Evil), and they worked together years later in Carol Reed's The Third Man, where he again held his own. (Cotten also wrote the screenplay for Journey into Fear.) But he worked with other top directors, too, including Alfred Hitchcock in the delightful Shadow of a Doubt and the disappointing Under Capricorn and George Cukor in the Victorian thriller Gaslight, and he appeared in three straight hit wartime romantic dramas: Since You Went Away, I'll Be Seeing You, and Love Letters. Cotten worked frequently in TV, too, but his later career was also marred by frequent appearances in schlocky films and TV movies. He did, however, have the distinction of appearing in the favorite films of three of the greatest directors: Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Third Man.

Kirk Douglas: Walter O'Neil, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

Douglas, who later became a screen legend playing brawny, ebullient heroes (and sometimes heels), made his bow, curiously enough, as a whipped, whiny drunk in a film noir classic, in which he acquitted himself well opposite ball of fire Barbara Stanwyck and the underrated Van Heflin. He followed that up with another great performance -- this time as a menacing bad guy -- in another great noir, Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum, and kept going for six decades, finally retiring when he was 90. Among his many great films were The Bad and the Beautiful, playing a ruthless Hollywood producer, Lust for Life, as Vincent van Gogh, and two films with Stanley Kubrick: the antiwar film Paths of Glory and the historical spectacle Spartacus (both of which he produced). Douglas, born Issur Danielovitch Demsky to poor Russian immigrant parents in New York, helped break the Hollywood blacklist (which required people accused of being Communist sympathizers to work under pseudonyms, if at all) when he insisted that Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo get screen credit for writing the screenplay.

Sydney Greenstreet: Kasper "Fat Man" Gutman, The Maltese Falcon

Greenstreet, a failed tea plantation owner by his early 20s, took up acting lessons on a lark and eventually worked with legendary stage couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, but it wasn't until he was 62 that he appeared on film. But he picked a good one -- and one of filmdom's most indelible roles. He appeared in three more movies with Maltese Falcon star Humphrey Bogart: Casablanca and the subpar Across the Pacific (with Mary Astor, too) and Passage to Marseilles (with Peter Lorre, too). (Greenstreet eventually teamed up with Lorre nine times.) The corpulent character actor appeared in only 20-odd films, few of them memorable, before he retired eight years after his film debut, but he had already earned his place in the hearts of film noir fans as Sam Spade's wily nemesis, and proved to be a compelling adversary in his other outings with Bogart.

Burt Lancaster: Ole "Swede" Anderson, The Killers

Lancaster, a former circus acrobat, had been acting professionally in theater for only a short while when, for his first film, he was tapped to star as a boxer sucker-punched by a femme fatale. The setup of this flashback film was based on the Ernest Hemingway short story of the same name, and not only Papa loved it -- it was a hit, and Lancaster immediately became a star. The strapping, handsome actor next appeared in the prison drama Brute Force and just kept going, acting for the next 45 years, and producing a dozen films (and even directing a couple). His most notable roles were as a soldier in From Here to Eternity, a manipulative newspaper columnist in Sweet Smell of Success, a traveling salesman turned revival-tent preacher in Elmer Gantry, the title character in Birdman of Alcatraz, an Italian aristocrat in The Leopard, a scheming general in Seven Days in May (with Douglas, a frequent costar), and a French Resistance leader in The Train. In addition, unlike many actors from his era, late-career success came in the form of roles of various sizes in hits like Atlantic City, Local Hero, and Field of Dreams.

Richard Widmark: Tommy Udo, Kiss of Death

Widmark, who had planned to become an attorney, caught the acting bug in college and, after a stint as a speech and drama teacher at his alma mater, became a radio performer in New York City for a few years before making it on Broadway. Then destiny called when he wowed legendary 20th Century-Fox producer Darryl F. Zanuck with his screen test for Kiss of Death, a film noir starring Victor Mature. Widmark's inspired decision to have his character, sadistic psychopath Tommy Udo, giggle maniacally, and his intense devotion to his role, helped earn him an Academy Award nomination (surprisingly, his only one), and within two years he was sticking his hands and feet in cement in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater. Ironically, the kind, soft-spoken, liberal Widmark was for a time typecast as villains, but he lobbied for good-guy roles and found fame playing both sides. After getting released from his contract as the studio system waned, he went freelance and also produced several films. His best work included major supporting roles in the otherwise overblown John Wayne picture The Alamo, Judgment at Nuremberg (in which Lancaster also had a key role), John Ford's last two westerns, How the West Was Won and Cheyenne Autumn, and the wartime thriller The Bedford Incident, one of his own productions.