Sydney Greenstreet (1879-1954)

          Sydney Greenstreet

Sydney Greenstreet was one of Hollywood's most brilliant character actors, able to play rogues whose villany in movies like 'Casablanca' and 'The Maltese Falcon' remain among the most memorable and enigmatic depictions of evil ever captured on film. Although he appeared in only 23 movies over an eight year film career, he is one of the best remembered and most recognizable of all film actors.

Search Amazon for Sydney Greenstreet

Biography

Greenstreet was born Sydney Hughes Greenstreet on December 27, 1879, in Sandwich, England, one of eight children. Aged 18 he left home and traveled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a tea planter but a drought foiled his plans and forced him to return to England where he became a brewery manager. He studied acting in the evening and made his stage debut playing a murderer in a 1902 production of 'Sherlock Holmes'. Within two years he traveled to the United States and made his Broadway debut and for over thirty years he continued successfuly to appear on stage in England and the US, moving easily between musical comedy and Shakespeare.

So Greenstreet was a late bloomer when in 1941, aged sixty two and weighing almost 300lbs, he made his screen debut in John Huston's 'The Maltese Falcon', achieving movie immortality as Kasper Gutman, 'The Fat Man', a ruthless rogue whose eyes gleam while he recounts the history of the prized object he has spent his life pursuing. Warner Brothers snapped up Greenstreet and kept him busy for the rest of the decade, often teamed with his 'Falcon' co-conspirator Peter Lorre. They are especially good in 'The Mask of Dimitrios' in 1944 and 'The Verdict' in 1946, in which Greenstreet is a sacked Victorian Scotland Yard inspector who petulantly decides to commit a perfect murder.

Despite only eight years appearing on the big screen, he managed to cram in a number of memorable parts that saw him holding his own with Hollywood legends such as Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, James Stewart, and Spencer Tracy. Greenstreet's speciality was shady characters, such as the proprietor of the Blue Parrot in 'Casablanca' in 1942 and Count Alessandro Fosco in The Woman in White' in 1948. But he could also slap on side-whiskers and play historical personages, such as Lieutenant General Winfield Scott in 'They Died with Their Boots On' in 1941 and William Makepeace Thackeray in 'Devotion'in 1946, or bluster as a bullying authority figure in comedy, as in 'Christmas in Connecticut' in 1945, or melodrama as in 'Flamingo Road', in 1949. In 'The Hucksters' in 1947, an expose of the advertising business, he spits at a business meeting to demonstrate that crassness can be memorable.

Greenstreet married in 1918 and had one son.

Having retired from the movies in 1949 due to ill health, Greenstreet worked on radio, adeptly playing the fictional private detective Nero Wolfe. He died on 18 January, 1954 due to complications from diabetes and nephritis. He was 75.