Birth Name: George Henry Sanders
Date of Birth: 3 July, 1906
Place of Birth: Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire (now Russia)
Date of Death: 25 April, 1972
Place of Death: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Ethnicity:
*German, as well as 1/16th English, remote Scottish (mother)
*possibly European Royal and Russian (father)
George Sanders was a Russian-born English actor, singer, songwriter, music composer, and author. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for All About Eve (1950).
George was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the son of Margarethe Jenny Bertha (Kolbe) and Henry Peter Ernest Sanders. His family moved to England because of the 1917 Russian Revolution. His brother was actor Tom Conway. George was married to English actress Benita Hume, until her death.
His mother was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Though she was of almost entirely ethnic German descent, she had German ancestry lines that had lived in Russia, as well as Estonia and Poland, since the 1600s.
Regarding George’s father’s ancestry, Richard Van Der Beets wrote, in the biography George Sanders: An Exhausted Life (1989):
Recent disclosures, however, indicate that Henry Sanders was illegitimately born to a Russian noblewoman of the Czar’s court on October 20, 1868, that his real father was ‘a prince of the house of Oldenburg’ married to a sister of the Czar. At the time of Henry’s birth, there was an Anglo-Russian family living in St. Petersburg named Sanders whose mother Dagmar, was a lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress, and by means of this court connection Henry was placed in the care of the Sanders family who, although comfortably well-off, were also given substantial funds for his keep and education. ‘Only in recent years, and through a chance remark,’ Maragaret [George’s sister] reports, ‘did the truth of our father’s background eventually come to light’.
The complete story was confirmed to her by Mara Sanders, the youngest daughter and last surviving member of the Anglo-Russian Sanders family, who ‘gradually came to the conclusion that since all concerned were now no longer alive, she no longer need keep the secret’.
George’s maternal grandfather was Robert Wilhelm Kolbe (the son of Ernst Ludwig Ferdinand Kolbe and Wilhelmine Schilling). Robert was born in Saint Petersburg. Ernst was born in Międzylesie, Poland, of German descent. Wilhelmine was born in Düsseldorf, Germany.
George’s maternal grandmother was Mary Hoth (the daughter of Wilhelm Hoth and Elizabeth Kroug). Mary was born in Saint Petersburg. Wilhelm was the son of John Hoth, who was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a German father and an English mother, and of Julie Karoline Bang, whose father was German. Elizabeth was the daugther of George Kroug and Sophie Juliane Baroth, whose parents were from Estonia.
Source: Genealogy of George Sanders – https://www.geni.com