George Sanders

The Art of Being a Refined Scoundrel

George Sanders was born in St. Petersburg in 1906 and spent half his life pretending the world owed him something. He was no method actor, and he never sought audience approval through cheap melodrama. He had a baritone voice that cut like a scalpel and a physical presence that radiated aristocratic contempt for everything around him.

He fled the Russian Revolution with his family and ended up in England, where he worked in the textile and tobacco industries. But the business world bored him to tears. So he tried his luck in theater and radio before making the leap to film in 1929 with roles nobody remembers.

His real break came in 1936 with Lloyd's of London. That was when it became clear Hollywood had found its perfect villain. He was not the bad guy who shouted or overgestured. He was the man who would steal your wallet and your wife while explaining why your wine was of poor vintage.

He was the villain everyone wanted to invite to dinner.

The Peak of On-Screen Cynicism

In 1940, he worked under Alfred Hitchcock in Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent. Sanders did not need to try hard to project that mix of elegance and danger that audiences loved at the time. And although he starred in franchises such as The Falcon and The Saint, he ended up hating those characters for being too flat for his intellect.

He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1950 for his portrayal of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve. In that film, he wasn't really acting. He simply put his real personality at the service of a script that seemed written for him. His line about being a "native of this world" remains the gold standard for any actor who wants to play a merciless critic.

But winning awards didn't bring him peace of mind. Sanders despised the film industry almost as much as he despised himself on his bad days.

And he pulled it off with absolute coolness.

An Ending Written in Advance

His personal life was a mess of failed marriages and business ventures that ended in financial disaster. He married Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1949 and years later married her sister Magda Gabor in a move the press of the time called surreal. But Sanders was no longer looking for love; he was looking for a way to ease the chronic boredom that had haunted him since his youth.

In the 1960s his career began to slide toward B-movies and supporting roles on television. He voiced the tiger Shere Khan in Disney's version of The Jungle Book in 1967. It was his last great flash of brilliance before his health and money began to run alarmingly low.

No one else could say so much with so little effort.

In 1972, George Sanders decided he had seen enough of this planet. He traveled to Spain and checked into a hotel in Castelldefels with a suitcase and a definitive plan. He left no unpaid debts or sentimental explanations to his closest friends.

He wrote a suicide note explaining that he was leaving because he was bored and felt he had already lived long enough. He died on April 25, 1972 after swallowing five bottles of Nembutal in his hotel room. He was 65 years old and left an almost nonexistent bank balance.