Episode # 27 Guest Star: Georges Sanders

- January 28, 2019

George Henry Sanders (3 July 1906 – 25 April 1972) was a British film and television actor, singer-songwriter, music composer, and author. 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 is perhaps best known as Jack Favell in Rebecca (1940), Scott ffolliott in Foreign Correspondent (1940) (a rare heroic part), Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), for which he won an Academy Award, 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.

Sanders was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, at number 6 Petrovski Ostrov. His parents were Henry Peter Ernest Sanders (1868–1960), and Margarethe Jenny Bertha Sanders (née Kolbe; 1883–1967), who was born in Saint Petersburg, of mostly German, but also Estonian and Scottish, ancestry.

In 1917, at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Sanders and his family moved to England. 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.

Sanders travelled to South America where he managed a tobacco plantation. The Depression sent him back to England. He worked at an advertising agency, where the company secretary, the aspiring actress Greer Garson, suggested that he take up a career in acting.

Sanders guest starred in The Rogues, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Daniel Boone. He played an upper-crust English villain, G. Emory Partridge, in two episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in 1965, "The Gazebo in the Maze Affair" and "The Yukon Affair". He also portrayed Mr. Freeze in two episodes of the live-action TV series Batman, both shown in February 1966.

In films he was in Last Plane to Baalbek (1965), Trunk to Cairo (1965), The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), The Quiller Memorandum (1966), Warning Shot(1967), and Good Times (1967) with Sonny and Cher.

Sanders's last significant performance was voicing the malevolent Shere Khan in the Walt Disney production of The Jungle Book (1967).
Sanders declared bankruptcy in 1966 due to some poor investments.

Sanders suffered from dementia, worsened by waning health, and visibly teetered in his last films, owing to a loss of balance. According to Aherne's biography, he also had a minor stroke. Sanders could not bear the prospect of losing his health or needing help to carry out everyday tasks and became deeply depressed. At about this time he found that he could no longer play his grand piano, so he dragged it outside and smashed it with an axe. His last girlfriend persuaded him to sell his beloved house in Majorca, Spain, which he later bitterly regretted. From then on he drifted.

On 23 April 1972, Sanders checked into a hotel in Castelldefels, a coastal town near Barcelona. He died of a cardiac arrest two days later, after swallowing the contents of five bottles of the barbiturate Nembutal. He left behind three suicide notes, one of which read:

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck"

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