GEORGE SANDERS

This super suave actor played in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, as well as the frankly dire ‘Falcon’ series of films all made on shoestring budget, but it is his tremendously mercurial role as the supercilious agent in All About Eve for which he is best known. Sanders was immortalised in song when the Kinks wrote Celluloiud Heroes containing the line ‘If you covered him with garbage George Sanders would still have style. Indeed he remained stylish, adding a touch of class to some very unappetizing movies until his suicide in 1972.

Famous line: recalled by David Niven: ‘I will have had enough of this earth by the time I am 65. after that I shall be having my bottom wiped by nurses and being pushed around in a wheelchair, so I shall commit suicide.’

famous line: I am not one of those people who would rather act than eat., quite the reverse. My own ambition as a boy was to retire, that ambition has not changed.’

autobiography: Memoirs of a Professional Cad (1960)

His last film was Psychomania, 1972.

Charles Boyer

A gentlemanly French actor, key film is probably the melodrama Gaslight. He committed suicide after the death of his wife of 44 years.

Famous line: ‘Come with me to the Casbah’ from Algiers.

Carole Landis 

(1919-1948)

Uninhibited, long legged actress. Her star shone brightly for a few years, she was a forces sweetheart. Born in Fairchild, Wisconsin, she was  working as an actress from her mid teens, and was in films from eighteen, first attracting attention in animal skins in 1 million BC. Her best role was as herself in four Hills in a Jeep, about her tour with Martha Ray, Kay Francis and Mitzi Mayfair. Married four times, she committed suicide over a failed affair with Rex Harrison.

CHARLES BUTTERWORTH  (1896-1946)

Balding American actor who through the thirties played his own style of shy upper-class bachelor, never getting the girl and sometimes drowning his sorrows in drink. He died in a car crash.