George Sanders

George Henry Sanders (3 July 1906 – 25 April 1972) was a British actor and singer whose career spanned over 40 years. His heavy, upper-class English accent and smooth, baritone voice often led him to be cast as sophisticated but villainous characters. He is remembered for his roles as wicked Jack Favell in Rebecca (1940), Scott ffolliott in Foreign Correspondent (1940, a rare heroic part), The Saran of Gaza in Samson and Delilah (1949), the most popular film of the year, Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950, for which he won an Oscar), Sir Brian De Bois-Guilbert in Ivanhoe (1952), King Richard the Lionheart in King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), Mr. Freeze in a two-part episode of Batman (1966), and the voice of Shere Khan in Disney's The Jungle Book (1967). Fans of radio detective stories know Sanders as Simon Templar, The Saint, (1939–41), and the suave crimefighter The Falcon (1941–42). Early life Sanders was born on 3 July 1906 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, at number 6 Petrovski Ostrov, to rope manufacturer Henry Sanders and horticulturist Margaret ( Kolbe), who was also born in Saint Petersburg, of mostly German, but also Estonian and Scottish ancestry (Sanders wrote of his mother's descent from "the Thomas Clayhills of Dundee, who went to Estonia in 1626 to establish a business there"). Sanders referred to his parents as "well-off" and noted his mother's "forebears of solid social position and impeccable respectability", stating that "to the best of (his) knowledge, (his) father came in the mail". A biography published in 1990 alleged that family members' "recent disclosures... indicate" that Sanders' father was the out-of-wedlock son of a Russian noblewoman of the Tsar's court, and a prince of the House of Oldenburg who was married to a sister of the Tsar. At the time of Henry Sanders's birth, the Anglo-Russian Sanders family were living at Saint Petersburg; the mother, Dagmar, was a lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress, and it was said to be through this connection Henry came to be adopted by the Sanders family. In 1917, at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Sanders and his family moved to Great Britain. Like his brother, he attended Bedales School and Brighton College, a boys' independent school in Brighton, then went on to Manchester Technical College, after which he worked in textile research.