George Sanders

George Sanders (born July 3, 1906, St. Petersburg, Russia—died April 25, 1972, Barcelona, Spain) was a Russian-born British actor who specialized in portraying elegant yet dissolute characters and was most noted for his roles as villains.

Sanders spent his childhood in Russia, but his British family moved to Hampshire, England, at the time of the Russian Revolution. According to his autobiography, Memoirs of a Professional Cad (1960), he worked for a time in a textile mill, managed a tobacco plantation in South America, and was employed at an advertising agency in England before deciding to become an actor. He started out in plays in London, and in 1936 he appeared in several minor British movies, among them The Man Who Could Work Miracles (in which he portrayed Indifference). That year he also was cast in the American movie Lloyd’s of London, and his memorable performance as a venomous posturer made him highly sought after.

Sanders subsequently appeared in such films as the comedy Love Is News (1937), The Lady Escapes (1937), Four Men and a Prayer (1938), and the British movie The Outsider (1939). He played Simon Templar (The Saint), an English adventurer and amateur detective, in The Saint Strikes Back (1939), The Saint in London (1939), The Saint’s Double Trouble (1940), The Saint Takes Over (1940), and The Saint in Palm Springs (1941). Sanders portrayed a similar character in The Gay Falcon (1941), A Date with the Falcon (1942), The Falcon Takes Over (1942), and The Falcon’s Brother (1942). His other early notable films included Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Foreign Correspondent (1940).

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Sanders played the lead in Albert Lewin’s The Moon and Sixpence (1942), an adaptation of a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. He appeared with Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara in the swashbuckler film The Black Swan (1942) and with Charles Laughton and O’Hara in Jean Renoir’s This Land Is Mine (1943). He then starred in the thrillers The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945), playing a Scotland Yard inspector and a psychiatrist, respectively. Sanders reteamed with Lewin on The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), in which he gave an acclaimed performance as Lord Henry Wotton, and on The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), based on a novel by Guy de Maupassant. Sanders’s other credits from 1947 included Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Otto Preminger’s Forever Amber, in which he was cast as King Charles II. Two years later he costarred with Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah.

Sanders’s arguably best performance, as the acerbic, sardonic critic Addison DeWitt in Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), earned him an Academy Award for best supporting actor. He later appeared in such films as I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951), with Susan Hayward and Dan Dailey; Ivanhoe (1952), with Elizabeth Taylor; the musical Call Me Madam (1953), with Ethel Merman and Donald O’Connor; Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954; Journey to Italy), with Ingrid Bergman; and Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps (1956). He hosted a short-lived television anthology series, The George Sanders Mystery Theater, in 1957. Sanders’s most notable later films include the horror movie Village of the Damned (1960), Blake Edwards’s A Shot in the Dark (1964; a sequel to The Pink Panther [1963]), and the animated The Jungle Book (1967), in which he voiced the tiger, Shere Khan. In 1972 Sanders died from an overdose of barbiturates and left a note naming boredom as the main reason for his suicide.