Tom Conway

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Tom Conway (born  September 15, 1904 in Saint Petersburg , Russia , †  April 22, 1967 in Culver City , Los Angeles County ) was a British actor and radio play speaker.

Life

Tom Conway was born Thomas Charles Sanders in Saint Petersburg, the first of three children. His parents, Henry Sanders (1873-1961) and Margaret Sanders (1875-1967), were British. He lived with them in Russia until the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. In England, Conway attended Brighton College with his brother George Sanders . After completing his training, Conway went to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia ), where he worked in gold, copper and asbestos mines. He also tried his hand at being a farmer. However, since he was not successful in any of these professions, he returned to England and started as an engineer at a carburetor manufacturer. He later became a seller of safety glass.

While his younger brother George was already enjoying success in film, Conway began to appear with a small theater company from Manchester. At the same time he had the first radio play roles for the BBC . George Sanders persuaded him to come to Hollywood, so he arrived there in 1940 and started working for MGM . By 1942 he starred in twelve films for MGM. When his brother George wanted to leave the B-movie series The Falcon ( RKO ) in 1941 , he successfully proposed Conway as his successor, and another ten Falcon films followed by 1946. Allegedly, with a tossed coin, the Sanders brothers drew lots to see which of the two should change its name so as not to irritate the audience; George Sanders won, and Tom Conway went on to use his pseudonym. The main actor changed in 1942 in The Falcon's Brother , where Conway appears as Tom Lawrence, whose brother Gay Lawrence is murdered.

On August 10, 1941, he married Lillian Eggers (they divorced on July 24, 1953). In 1942 and 1943 he played supporting roles in three horror classics by the screenwriter Val Lewton : Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

In addition to the Falcon series, Conway had radio appearances in 1947 as Sherlock Holmes , which he took over as the successor to Basil Rathbone . But the public did not accept him, and so he was replaced by John Stanley that same year . On television he played the role of Mark Saber in the detective series of the same name in 1951 . Conway used the crisis in the Hollywood studios in the early 1950s for films in Great Britain, for radio and television appearances. He replaced Vincent Price in his radio role as The Saint , which his brother George Sanders had played in the film a few years earlier.

However, his film appearances became less and less over the years. He played an exceptional role in October 1957 as ventriloquist Max Collodi in the thriller story The Glass Eye in the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents . He also made regular appearances on the Betty Hutton Show (1959). On February 11, 1958, he married the actress Queenie Leonard (they divorced on February 11, 1963). His last two films were a speaking role in the Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and a supporting role in What a Way to Go! (1964).

Although Tom Conway is said to have made more than a million dollars in his 24-year career, he ended up running into financial difficulties. Binge drinking led to the breakdown of his second marriage and increasingly to health problems such as visual disturbances. His brother George also broke off contact with him. At the end of 1964 he had cataract surgery , but from then on he had to wear thick glasses. When newspaper reports announced in September 1965 that he was living in a cheap shack in Venice , he received a little support from various quarters . During one of his increasingly frequent hospital stays, his former sister-in-law Zsa Zsa Gabor visited him in April 1967 . She slipped him $ 200 and allegedly said, "Give the nurses a little tip so they'll treat you well." The next day, Conway left the hospital on his own, went to his girlfriend's apartment, and died there on April 22nd Cirrhosis of the liver .

Filmography

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Conway, Tom
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sanders, Thomas Charles (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British actor and radio play speaker
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Petersburg , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 1967
Place of death Culver City , Los Angeles County , California , United States