Sydney Greenstreet made his first film at sixty-one, in The Maltese Falcon, after forty years on the stage, and was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for it.
He weighed close to three hundred pounds and used it with complete precision, sitting still while everyone else moved, and the laugh in that film is genuinely unsettling.
He made nine films with Peter Lorre, and the pairing of his bulk against Lorre’s nervous smallness became a fixture of Warner Bros in the 1940s.
He made only twenty-four films in total, retiring in 1949 due to ill health, which is a remarkably compressed and consistent body of work.
