George Sanders was born in St Petersburg in 1906. He left Russia in 1917 with his family, who settled in England and had George educated at Bedales and Brighton College. He made his British film debut in 1929, but it was in 1930's Hollywood that he honed his distinctive, charming-yet-dangerous screen persona—the quintessential cad. He co-starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, both released in 1940, and went on to win an Academy Award for his signature role, that of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, 1950. He continued to work in films until the year his death in 1972. In the 1940's, Sanders' film-star status was the impetus for his two crime novels, both featuring recognizably Sanders-esque heroes: Crime on My Hands (1944) and Stranger at Home (1946). In 1960 came a third book: his autobiography, fittingly titled Memoirs of a Professional Cad in which the line between fiction and fact is blurred even more convincingly—and wittily—than in the novels. |
