George Sanders

I always liked George Sanders even when he was in quite poor films; you couldn't help being struck by and admiring in a funny sort of way that plummy English accent, those rolling tones perfect for Wildean disdain (as in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"). He seemed to have made a living out of practising a soft kind of disdain that only in films in which he played a villain became vile.
I remember him in films like "Samson and Delila", "The Moon and Sixpence" and other poor stuff and, more pleasantly, in "All about Eve" and "This Land is Mine". Of course his early work as The Saint and thereafter The Falcon (played later by his elder brother, Tom Conway) was amusing, light entertainment and his late work was pretty disastrous. Then there were in-between films like "Rebecca", where he played someone he could do so well - the cad - and, also for Hitchcock, "Foreign Correspondent".
Of course his finest role was in "All about Eve" for which he won an oscar, deservedly so. A little known film which starred Charles Laughton had Sanders playing a man who collaborates with the Nazis and here I thought he was superb.
Maybe the best directors got the best out of him: Joseph Mankiewicz in "All about Eve"; Jean Renoir in "This Land is Mine" and Robert Rossellini in "Viaggio in Italia" (not seen by me) about which David Thomson has written "Rossellini boldly cut through irritability to the shy observer of life who hid behind Sanders's barbs."
Thomson again: "The movie business feels so flat nowadays without figures like George Sanders."