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Staats Cotsworth is scarcely remembered today by anybody outside of the acting profession, and even then, they'd need to be very old actors to recall him. He had only three feature-film appearances to his credit, and didn't do too much theater work either, nor did he need to: For much of the 1940s, he was radio's busiest actor, performing continuing roles in as many as ten series at any given time, including Lone Journey, Stella Dallas, and Mr. and Mrs. North, and starring in Casey, Crime Photographer. Born in Oak Park, IL, in 1908, Cotsworth entered the acting profession as a member of Eva Le Gallienne's repertory company in New York. His arrival in the city coincided with the boom in radio, which became the dominant mass medium of the 1930s and was centered in New York. Although he was a classically trained actor with experience in Shakespearean roles, Cotsworth gravitated toward the new medium, which seemed to offer vast opportunities, and it was there that he made his name and his fortune. By the mid-'40s, when the average American's salary was 3,000 dollars a year, Cotsworth earned over 50,000 dollars a year on radio. It was only in the mid-'50s, with the medium's decline, that he began working on television, first on anthology series such as Studio One out of New York, and later on programs such as Dr. Kildare and Bonanza from Hollywood. During the 1960s, he was also a regular on As the World Turns and The Edge of Night, and also played the avuncular male lead in "Go Fight City Hall," a failed pilot for a proposed series that was to have starred Irene Dunne as a widowed mother who enters local politics. By that time, in his late fifties and sixties, he slipped easily into dignified older male character roles, often playing judges, senators, and similar parts. Cotsworth made his first feature-film appearance in Peyton Place (1957), playing Charles Partidge, and later appeared in Anthony Harvey's New York-filmed comedy They Might Be Giants (1971) (he was one of a group of old-time players, including Worthington Miner, Sudie Bond, and Frances Fuller, who appeared in the film). He also did a voice-over role in the 1973 horror movie Silent Night, Bloody Night.