Russian-born British film and television actor, singer-songwriter and author, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the acerbic, cold-blooded theatre critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950). His career as an actor spanned over forty years. His upper-class English accent and bass voice often led him to be cast as sophisticated but villainous characters. He was known for his rude, cynical and often disagreeable demeanour; Sanders was easily typecast as the witty heavy or dedicated crank.
He appeared in 90 films from 1936. He is perhaps best known as Jack Favell in Rebecca (1940), Scott ffolliott in Foreign Correspondent (1940, a rare heroic part), Sir Brian De Bois-Guilbert in Ivanhoe (1952), King Richard the Lionheart in King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), Mr. Freeze in a two-parter episode of Batman (1966), the voice of the malevolent man-hating tiger Shere Khan in Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967), and as Simon Templar, The Saint, in five films made in the 1930s and 1940s.
Born to British parents living in St. Petersburg, his family fled back to Britain during the communist revolution, when he was 11. The actor Tom Conway (1904–1967) was George Sanders’s elder brother. Their younger sister, Margaret Sanders, was born in 1912.
Sanders had it all, fame, an Oscar, money, a fascinating life and five wives, including both Zsa Zsa Gabor and her sister Magda. He called his 1960 autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad, confessing of himself rudeness and incivility, once stating that “a woman is never worth what she costs, even if she costs nothing.”
On 25 April 1972, in a hotel room in Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain, Sanders committed suicide by swallowing five bottles of Nembutal. He left behind a note saying “Dear World, I am leaving you because I’m bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool and good luck.”
Link to Wikipedia biography