Fat Man

The only Hollywood actor to have an atomic bomb named after him, Sydney Greenstreet was 61 when he made his American movie debut in 1941; and quite a debut it was as Kaspar Gutman in The Maltese Falcon (for the origins of the real Maltese Falcon read The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of).  Once you saw and heard Greenstreet you never forgot him;


Greenstreet appeared in 24 films, retiring in 1949; Peter Lorre co-starred with him nine times, including The Maltese Falcon. Here's a little montage of the two of them


Though he appeared in few films, many of them are now considered classics along with The Maltese Falcon - Casablanca in which he played Rick's competitor, Signor Ferrari owner of The Blue Parrot; They Died With Their Boots On; Passage To Marseille (with Bogart again); Across The Pacific (with Bogart for the 4th time); The Mask Of Dimitrios; Christmas In Connecticut (with the luminous Barbara Stanwyck).

Born in Britain (he later became a naturalized American), Greenstreet first appeared onstage in 1902, and had a long and distinguished stage career in both Britain and America before making his first Hollywood film.

During WW2 the Manhattan Project developed three designs for atomic bombs, with different triggers for each - uranium gun, plutonium gun, and an implosion device. Each was given a code name by project physicist Robert Serber; Little Boy for the uranium, Thin Man for the plutonium, and for the implosion device, the roundest and fattest of the three bombs, Fat Man, which Serber named after Greenstreet's character in The Maltese Falcon who Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) refers to as The Fat Man.  Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, Fat Man on Nagasaki.