Fifty eight years ago today, suave and accomplished 42-year-old movie star George Sanders married the 32-year-old Hungarian beauty Sari – better known as Zsa Zsa – Gabor in Las Vegas.  Zsa Zsa had divorced her second husband (and the father of her only child, daughter Francesa) millionaire hotelier Conrad Hilton in 1947 – her first husband was a Turkish diplomat – and it was the second marriage for the debonair Sanders. 

By 1949 George Sanders had already cemented his reputation as an accomplished and versatile screen presence, working both as a leading man and supporting actor in many films, such as his runs as detectives The Saint and The Falcon, roles in Hitchcock-directed hits Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent and more than fifty others since his first screen appearance in 1932.  His greatest role, and the one that brought him a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, was as jaded theater critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), a crystalline portrayal that was cynicism personified, yet with a sneering charm that seemed to be Sanders’ trademark. 

Zsa Zsa’s younger sister Eva Gabor had been in Hollywood for several years when Zsa Zsa decided to give big screen show business a whirl, after a previous career as a sometime beauty contest-winner, trained singer, and girl-about-town with a succession of rich boyfriends.  It’s probably Zsa Zsa that we must thank for the then-nascent cult of the celebrity, which now seems to substitute for any real sense of American popular culture.  It’s not all her fault, although she’s certainly more famous for who she was and who she married than for any lasting screen or TV work.  She didn’t even appear onscreen until 1952, but soon made a good impression in director John Huston’s biography of Toulouse Lautrec Moulin Rouge, though the two reportedly had a rough off-screen working relationship.  A distinguished screen career seemed not to be Zsa Zsa’s destiny, though she had credits galore and made one of the most notorious, ridiculous and delightful B science fiction movies ever, 1958’s Queen of Outer Space.  (And Zsa Zsa wasn’t the titular royalty, either; she was a brilliant lady scientist, viz an accent, too!)  

To probably no one’s great surprise, Sanders and Gabor divorced in 1954, though a few years later Gabor stated that Sanders had been the one husband she really loved.  Perhaps, yes, but it didn’t stop her from marrying six more times over the next many decades.  Her current husband, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt – they married in 1986 – today cares for an ailing Zsa Zsa in her Bel Air home, and recently garnered tabloid headlines of his own after becoming embroiled in the who’s-the-daddy mess surrounding the baby of the late Anna Nicole Smith. 

George Sanders continued working tirelessly in movies and TV for another decade and a half, and would marry twice more.  In 1959 he married actress Benita Hume, who had been widowed the year before from the beloved and talented actor Ronald Colman; they been happily married for twenty years.  The Hume-Sanders marriage was also a contented one, and George was despondent when Benita succumbed to cancer in 1967.  Three years later he wed once again to – would you believe – Zsa Zsa’s older sister Madga, but the marriage lasted only one year.  Sanders would not marry again, but only a year or so later a woman with whom he was romantically involved persuaded him to sell his beloved home in Spain.  He fell into a deep depression and committed suicide on April 25, 1972.  The legacy of George Sanders is a filmography full of memorable roles and a well-earned reputation as the ultimate movie cad (please read this excellent article by Gary Kamiya from Salon, and be sure to listen to the rueful rendition of “September Song” by Sanders), which just proves what a very good actor he was, after all.