Much of the life of George Sanders sounds like a character he played. He was born in St. Petersburg to English parents; when he was a child, the family fled the Revolution. He managed a South American tobacco plantation. Failing at that, he returned to the UK. The secretary at the advertising firm where he worked, Actually Greer Garson, suggested to him that he might consider acting. He did, and he became quite a success. Won an Oscar and everything. He eventually married two Gabor sisters and, as he had long said he planned to do, killed himself.

What he played best, and he knew it himself, was ever so slightly sleazy men who were out for their own best interests and not terribly worried about other people. From what little I’ve read, this was barely acting on his part. He hated giving interviews—because he didn’t get paid for them. And I mean, he did willingly marry two Gabor sisters, being Zsa Zsa’s third husband and Magda’s fifth. That just feels really cynical, somehow, and it’s kind of hard to explain why I think that. But the little bits and pieces I read suggest that he had the same general disdain for a lot of humanity, and he even had at least a certain amount of the wit, of a lot of George Sanders characters.

My goodness but there are some iconic characters there, though. He was the second movie version of Simon Templar, the Saint. And for a while, he played a character named Gay Laurence, the Falcon; when he got tired of the role, he passed it on to his brother, Tom Conway. But more notably, he was Addison DeWitt, and he was Jack Favell, and of course he was Shere Khan—even before he was cast in that last, the drawings they were producing of the character already started to resemble him because of the direction they were thinking for the character.

When he shows up in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, you’re kind of left wondering how said ghost could take a George Sanders character seriously as a romantic interest for Mrs. Muir. He can’t be trusted, and I suppose the audience knows it before any of the characters, especially a modern audience familiar with decades of untrustworthy George Sanders characters. He played Charles II in Forever Amber, and that’s an appropriate casting. I haven’t seen King Richard and the Crusaders, but I’m sure he’s an appropriate King Richard I as well.

And that is, to be quite frank, whether or not you think Richard I was gay. It seems obvious to me that Sanders was not; two different Gabors wouldn’t be good choices for lavender marriages. Perhaps he was bisexual; I don’t have any reason to believe he was, but then I don’t have any reason to believe he wasn’t. What is assuredly true is that he was a gay icon, and he still is. Many of his roles were of uncertain sexuality; Addison DeWitt may claim to own Eve Harrington, but does he want to sleep with her? Who even knows? Shere Khan doesn’t have sexuality, given there are no other tigers in The Jungle Book, but still.

Sanders went broke from poor investments, but contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi wouldn’t be a poor investment on your part!