Sydney Greenstreet

Sydney Greenstreet's Hollywood career is one of the great late blooms in movie history. An Englishman who had spent decades as a respected stage actor on both sides of the Atlantic, he did not appear in a single film until he was past sixty, an age when most performers are winding down. Then, in one role, he became immortal.

That role was Kasper Gutman, the corpulent, courtly obsessive of "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), forever chasing the jeweled bird. Enormous, immaculately spoken and terrifyingly genial, Greenstreet made villainy sound like the most reasonable thing in the world, his chuckle a small avalanche. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination in his very first film, an almost unheard-of debut, and it announced a whole new figure in American cinema: the fat man as sinister aesthete.

Warner Bros. paired him again and again with Peter Lorre, and the contrast, the vast, unhurried Greenstreet against the twitchy, wounded Lorre, became one of the great screen double acts, running through nine pictures. Together they lent shadowy weight to "Casablanca" (1942), where Greenstreet was the fez-wearing rival club owner Signor Ferrari, and to a run of atmospheric melodramas that helped shape the visual and moral world of film noir.

Greenstreet's whole career on film lasted barely a decade and comprised only a couple of dozen pictures, yet his imprint on the culture is out of all proportion to that small body of work. His voice, his laugh and his bulk became instantly recognizable shorthand for genteel menace, endlessly parodied and quoted.

Ill health forced his retirement at the end of the 1940s, and he died in 1954. He left behind no leading roles, no long apprenticeship on screen, only the astonishing fact that a man who came to the movies at an age when others retire made himself one of the medium's unforgettable faces. He remains the patron saint of the late starter, proof that it is never too late to become a legend.