Sydney Greenstreet ✝

Sydney Hughes Greenstreet (December 27, 1879 – January 18, 1954) was a British-American actor. While he did not begin his career in films until the age of 61, he had a run of significant motion pictures in a Hollywood career lasting through the 1940s. He is best remembered for his Warner Bros. films with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), and Passage to Marseille (1944). He portrayed Nero Wolfe on radio during 1950 and 1951. He became a United States citizen in 1925. Sidney Hughes Greenstreet was born on December 27, 1879, in Sandwich, Kent, the son of Ann (née Baker) and John Jarvis Greenstreet, a tanner. He had seven siblings. He left home at the age of 18 to make his fortune as a Ceylon tea planter, but drought forced him out of business. He began managing a brewery and, to escape boredom, took acting lessons. Greenstreet's stage debut was as a murderer in a 1902 production of a Sherlock Holmes story at the Marina Theatre, Ramsgate, Kent.[citation needed] He toured Britain with Ben Greet's Shakespearean company, and in 1905 made his New York City debut in Everyman. He appeared in such plays as a revival of As You Like It (1914). He appeared in numerous plays in Britain and America, working through most of the 1930s with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne at the Theatre Guild. His stage roles ranged from musical comedy to Shakespeare, and years of such versatile acting on two continents led to many offers to appear in films. He refused until he was 61.