“The lens is the actor’s best critic… showing his mind more clearly than on the stage. You can get wonderful cooperation out of the lens if you are true, but God help you if you are not. Pictures are much harder to do than the theatre… You’re at the mercy of the camera angles and the piecemeal technique” – Sydney Greensteet

He started acting in films at the age of 61, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in his first picture, lent his nickname to an atomic bomb and was an inspiration for Jabba the Hutt.

Sydney Hughes Greenstreet was born in Sandwich, Kent, England, one of eight children. Aged 18 and full of ambition, he left home and travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a tea planter but a drought foiled his plans for a business career, and forced him to return to England where he a held down a variety of jobs including managing a brewery, while studying acting in the evening under Shakespearean actor, Ben Greet as a way to escape boredom. He made his stage debut playing a murderer in a 1902 production of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and then gained invaluable experience touring Britain for two years with Greet’s Shakespearean company. In 1905 he travelled with them to the United States and made his New York debut that year, playing in Everyman. By March 1907 he made his Broadway debut as a cast member in The Merchant of Venice at the Garden theatre. He was a noted Shakespearean actor, reputedly having acted in every major Shakespearean play and committed 12,000 lines of Shakespearean verse to memory. He returned to Broadway some 30 times playing in productions ranging from musical comedy to Chekhov and Shakespeare. He was equally in demand on the British stage and resolutely turned down offers to appear in films.

In 1940 Greenstreet was appearing as Uncle Waldemar in There Shall Be No Night at the Alvin Theatre, 250 W. 52nd St. (renamed the Neil Simon Theatre in June 1983). He was seen by producer Hal Wallis and was suggested as a possibility to the first-time director John Huston to play a key character in his forthcoming production. Huston, an established screenwriter, had persuaded Warner Bros to allow him to direct one of his screenplays, conditional on his previous script being a success. That script was for High Sierra (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh. The film became the hit Huston wanted. It also made Humphrey Bogart a star with his first major role, as a gunman on the run. Warners kept their end of the bargain, and gave Huston his choice of subject.

“They indulged me rather. They liked my work as a writer and they wanted to keep me on. If I wanted to direct, why, they’d give me a shot at it, and if it didn’t come off all that well, they wouldn’t be too disappointed as it was to be a very small picture.” – John Huston

The film was The Maltese Falcon, a film which failed at the box office in two earlier versions by Warners. It was seen as a B movie, allocated a budget of just $300,000 and made in eight weeks.

Huston met Greenstreet in Los Angeles and gave him a screen test. Greenstreet, who was then 61 years old and weighed between 280 and 350 pounds, impressed Huston with his sheer size, distinctive abrasive laugh, bulbous eyes, and manner of speaking. Sydney Greenstreet accepted his first film role and played Kasper Gutman, the “Fat Man”. Bogart was a first-time leading man and Peter Lorre’s declining career was revitalised with his performance as Joel Cairo. It was to be the first of nine film pairings with Greenstreet.

via GIPHY

“Sydney Greenstreet is a total delight as somewhat of a villain, and an audience surrogate—his Kasper Gutman can’t stop telling Spade he is “a chap worth knowing. An amazing character!” – Hollywood Times, October 18, 1941

The picture received three Oscar nominations including Best Supporting Actor for 61-year-old newcomer Sydney Greenstreet.

Greenstreet made another 23 films in his short film career, retiring in 1949 suffering from diabetes and acute nephritis. After The Maltese Falcon he appeared as Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott in the Errol Flynn / Olivia de Havilland Western, They Died with Their Boots On (1941). He then played Dr Lorenz in John Huston’s spy thriller Across the Pacific (1942) with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor.

His third film with Bogart as the star was directed by Michael Curtiz. Peter Lorre also played a key part but he and Greenstreet didn’t share any scenes. The film was Casablanca.

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’sAlthough Greenstreet often played shady, malevolent characters, such as Count Alessandro Fosco in The Woman in White (1948) his skill and versatility enabled him to play historical roles, such as William Makepeace Thackeray in Devotion (1946). He could also bluster as a bullying authority figure in comedy, as in Christmas in Connecticut (1945) or melodrama in Flamingo Road (1949). In The Hucksters (1947), an expose of the advertising business, he spits at a business meeting to demonstrate that crassness can be memorable. His last film, appearing with Spencer Tracy and James Stewart was Malaya (1949). Despite ill-health he continued acting for a further two years, playing Nero Wolfe on the NBC radio program, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, based loosely on the rotund detective genius created by Rex Stout.

“Fat Man” was the codename for the nuclear bomb that was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki by the United States on 9 August 1945. Fat Man was an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core as opposed to “Thin Man”, a plutonium gun-type nuclear bomb development of which was abandoned after spontaneous fission rate problems. Thin Man was a very long device, and the name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel The Thin Man and series of movies. The Fat Man was round and fat and was named after Sydney Greenstreet’s character in The Maltese Falcon. Little Boy, the first atomic weapon o be used in warfare, came last as a variation of Thin Man.

Sydney Greenstreet partially inspired the appearance of Jabba the Hut in the “Star Wars” series. When asked what the intergalactic gangster should look like by the designer, George Lucas replied, “A big blob, a huge mass of matter.” The designer immediately thought of Greenstreet in Casablanca (1942). At one point during the production, a fez was placed on the final Jabba’s head, to make him look like Greenstreet.

via GIPHY

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