George Sanders

George Henry Sanders was born on 3 July 1906 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, at 6 Petrovski Ostrov, to Henry Sanders, a rope manufacturer, and Margaret Sanders (née Kolbe), a horticulturist who was herself born in Saint Petersburg and was of mostly German, Estonian, and Scottish ancestry. Sanders described his parents as "well-off" and noted his mother's descent from "the Thomas Clayhills of Dundee, who went to Estonia in 1626 to establish a business there." A 1990 biography alleged, based on family disclosures, that Henry Sanders was the out-of-wedlock son of a Russian noblewoman and a prince of the House of Oldenburg, and that Henry came to be adopted by the Sanders family through his mother Dagmar's position as a lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, the family relocated to Great Britain. Sanders attended Bedales School and Brighton College, as did his brother, and subsequently studied at Manchester Technical College before working in textile research. He later managed a tobacco plantation in South America, returning to Britain during the Depression to work at an advertising agency, where a company secretary named Greer Garson encouraged him to pursue acting.

Sanders learned to sing and secured a stage role in Ballyhoo, which had a short run but helped establish him as a performer. He went on to appear regularly on the British stage, including several productions with Edna Best and a co-starring role with Dennis King in The Command Performance. In 1934, he traveled to New York to appear on Broadway in Noël Coward's Conversation Piece, directed by Coward himself, which ran for 55 performances. He would continue his Broadway career through 1984, with credits that also included the musical On Your Toes.

Sanders' film career began in earnest when 20th Century-Fox cast him as Lord Everett Stacy in Lloyd's of London (1936), opposite Tyrone Power. The film was a substantial hit, and Fox placed Sanders under a seven-year contract in November 1936. His smooth bass voice, upper-class English accent, and air of suave menace made him a sought-after presence in Hollywood, where he was frequently cast as sophisticated villains and morally ambiguous figures. RKO cast him as Simon Templar in The Saint Strikes Back (1939), and he went on to appear in five of the eight films in The Saint series between 1939 and 1941. In 1940, he played the wicked Jack Favell in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, alongside Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, and appeared as the heroic Scott ffolliott in Foreign Correspondent the same year.

RKO replaced The Saint series with The Falcon in 1941, assigning Sanders the lead role of Gay Laurence in the first four of the sixteen Falcon films. Saint author Leslie Charteris sued the studio over the resemblance between the two characters, and Sanders himself was dissatisfied with the role, departing the series in 1942 and being replaced by his elder brother, Tom Conway. That same year, United Artists borrowed Sanders to play the lead in The Moon and Sixpence, based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel. His relationship with Fox during this period was contentious; the studio suspended him twice in 1942 for refusing roles he considered beneath him, before eventually offering him a raise and a lead role in They Came to Blow Up America.

Sanders portrayed King Charles II in Fox's Forever Amber (1947) and played The Saran of Gaza in Samson and Delilah (1949), the most popular film of that year. His most celebrated screen performance came in All About Eve (1950), in which he played theater critic Addison DeWitt. The role earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He subsequently appeared in Ivanhoe (1952) for MGM as Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, dying in a duel with Robert Taylor after professing his love for Elizabeth Taylor's character Rebecca, and played King Richard the Lionheart in King Richard and the Crusaders (1954). He traveled to Italy to appear opposite Ingrid Bergman in Journey to Italy (1954) and made several further films for MGM, including Moonfleet (1955) and The King's Thief (1955).

In 1960, Sanders starred in Village of the Damned as a professor determined to teach an unusual group of children how to be human. He played Mr. Freeze in a two-part episode of the television series Batman in 1966, and provided the voice of Shere Khan in Disney's animated feature The Jungle Book in 1967. Sanders died on 25 April 1972, having maintained a career in film, television, and stage that spanned more than four decades.