22 Facts About Gregory Ratoff

Gregory Ratoff was born on Grigory Vasilyevich Ratner; Russian:, tr.

Gregory Ratoff's date of birth is given as September 13,1877 in the California Death Index, which would have made her a teenager when Gregory was born, as young as 15 if 1893 is the correct year of Gregory Ratoff's birth.

An eyewitness to the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution, Gregory Ratoff fled Russia with his parents in 1922 and settled in Paris, where he wooed Evgenia Konstantinovna Leontovich, the daughter of a Czarist army officer, who, too, had escaped to Paris.

Gregory Ratoff joined in the thriving Yiddish theater in New York City, producing, directing and acting for the Yiddish Players as he became something of a theatrical impresario, even performing in a Yiddish film.

Gregory Ratoff graduated to Broadway later in the decade, appearing in Shubert productions as he learned English, though his mastery of the language always was heavily accented and this, in fact, became his stock-in-trade in his busy future career as a character actor.

Gregory Ratoff arrived in 1931 and caught a lucky break: in Gregory La Cava's Symphony of Six Million, producer David O Selznick had insisted, very unusually for the time, that this Fannie Hurst story of a brilliant Jewish doctor escaping his tenement roots be cast with authentic Yiddish actors from the Lower East Side.

Gregory Ratoff followed with his first screenwriting effort, Cafe Metropole, and soon directed on his own with Lancer Spy, starring Peter Lorre, Dolores del Rio and George Sanders.

Gregory Ratoff directed five movies by 1939, all under contract for Fox, while still acting.

Gregory Ratoff directed Intermezzo: A Love Story, when David O Selznick was loaned Ratoff by Fox to direct his new Swedish protege Ingrid Bergman in her American debut.

Gregory Ratoff saw her as "sensational", as he told Life.

Gregory Ratoff never reached such heights again, and he never entered the top ranks of Hollywood directors.

Gregory Ratoff dropped acting and left Fox in 1941 for a Columbia directing contract.

Gregory Ratoff had been lent out for this MGM project because the musical romance had become one of his specialties after his work in Intermezzo.

Gregory Ratoff collapsed near the end of shooting and had to be replaced by another emigre, Hungarian Laszlo Benedek.

Gregory Ratoff's directing career in Hollywood never recovered, and he returned to acting, playing his most famous role as the befuddled producer Max Fabian in All About Eve.

Gregory Ratoff directed a Broadway play The Fifth Season which was a hit.

Gregory Ratoff found his remaining opportunities outside of the US The English comedy Abdulla the Great, which he produced, directed, and starred in as a Middle Eastern potentate, proved a complete failure, but his low-budget film of Jo Eisinger's play Oscar Wilde won plaudits for Robert Morley in the title role, while Ralph Richardson was commended for his role as the barrister who destroys Wilde on the witness stand.

Gregory Ratoff was one of the two producers to have purchased and developed the original rights to the James Bond franchise from Ian Fleming in 1955, which subsequently became the subject of a bitter legal dispute.

Gregory Ratoff was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 1960, just months before his death in Switzerland.

Gregory Ratoff died on December 14,1960, in Solothurn, Switzerland from leukemia, aged 67.

Gregory Ratoff's body was returned to the United States for burial at Mount Hebron Cemetery, Flushing, New York.

Gregory Ratoff was interred under a gravestone marked "Beloved Husband".