Mr. George Sanders would have been 100 years old today.
I'm a bit fatutzed with TCM for not acknowledging him.
But I would like to remember Mr. Sanders on his birthday. He rocked the house.
He won an Oscar for his role in All About Eve, and rightly so. Who else could deliver lines like, "She's a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts" with such aplomb?
Mr. Sanders was a White Russian.
His family had to flee St. Petersburg during the revolution. He tells a story in his memoirs about his uncle lying in bed with a pistol and having a manservant smear the ceiling with jam so he could shoot the flies that gathered to lap it up. Mr. Sanders felt the communists robbed him of the chance to emulate such voluptuous indolence, so he was a die-hard anti-Communist all his life.
Mr. Sanders got the idea to dip his toe into the theatre because of this cute, red-headed secretary who turned out to be Greer Garson. But he never did like it. Louis B. Mayer got a look at him early in his career and got it in his head that Mr. Sanders could be developed into a leading man. So he set up a lunch meeting.
On the appointed day, Mr. Sanders got so caught up working on a telescope he was building that he blew off the lunch. In his later years, he was grateful he hadn't made it, as a character actor can keep working when the bloom of youth has faded.
Everybody quotes his famous suicide note about how bored he was, but he left a second note for his little sister, in which he expressed his fear of becoming incapacitated. He'd had a couple of strokes, and had recently seen his mother and his wife die long, agonizing deaths. He wanted to check out while he could still wipe his own ass, so he did.
Wherever you are, Mr. Sanders, God bless you. I run into lots of fans of yours on these here internets. You are still loved.
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