Gregory Ratoff

Gregory Ratoff, born Grigory Vasilyevich Ratner in Samara, Russia, was a Russian-American actor, film director, and producer whose career spanned Broadway, Hollywood, and international cinema. His birth date is variously recorded as April 20, 1893, 1896, or 1897, with his mother later giving April 7, 1895 as one recorded date. He died on December 14, 1960, in Solothurn, Switzerland, from leukemia, at age 67.

Ratoff was the eldest of four children born to Benjamin Ratner and Sophie, née Markison. His mother later took the stage surname Ratoff upon becoming a naturalized United States citizen and died on August 27, 1955. Though his father's name was Benjamin, Ratoff adopted the patronymic Vasilyevich, a less overtly Jewish-sounding choice. He had been studying law at the University of St. Petersburg when World War I interrupted his education and drew him into service in the Czar's army. After the war, he abandoned his legal studies and joined the Moscow Art Theater, where he established himself as an actor. A witness to the Bolshevik Revolution, he fled Russia with his parents in 1922 and settled in Paris. There he met Evgenia Konstantinovna Leontovich, later known as actress Eugenie Leontovich, the daughter of a Czarist army officer who had also escaped to Paris. The two were performing together in a Paris production of the Russe Revue when New York impresario Lee Shubert brought the show to Broadway, bringing the couple with it. They chose to remain in the United States, and married on January 19, 1923.

Ratoff's Broadway career ran from 1922 to 1931. After arriving with the Russe Revue, he worked in New York's Yiddish theater, producing, directing, and acting for the Yiddish Players and even appearing in a Yiddish film. He gradually transitioned to Broadway, appearing in Shubert productions while learning English, though his heavily accented command of the language would remain a defining characteristic throughout his career. His Broadway credits included the musical Blossom Time, the musical Castles in the Air, the play Tenth Avenue, and the play Wonder Boy, among other productions. When the Depression curtailed Broadway activity, Ratoff joined the wave of New York theater professionals who moved to Hollywood as film studios sought talent experienced with spoken dialogue.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1931 and secured an early foothold through Gregory La Cava's Symphony of Six Million, in which producer David O. Selznick had cast authentic Yiddish actors from the Lower East Side. Ratoff played an immigrant father who dies on his son's operating table, and the role led to five more engagements in rapid succession, including the Selznick production What Price Hollywood? (1932), directed by George Cukor. His large frame and accented English led to frequent typecasting as either a villain in American settings or as a foreigner in the many films of the 1930s that recreated a glamorous fictional Europe. He appeared in the pre-Code film I'm No Angel (1933) as Mae West's character's lawyer, served in the French Foreign Legion in Frank Lloyd's Under Two Flags (1936), and played a Russian sergeant in Howard Hawks' The Road to Glory (1936).

In 1936, Ratoff moved behind the camera for the first time, co-directing Sins of Man for Twentieth Century-Fox with Otto Brower. He followed with a screenwriting credit on Cafe Metropole (1937) and then directed Lancer Spy (1937), starring Peter Lorre, Dolores del Río, and George Sanders. By 1939 he had directed five films under contract at Fox while continuing to act. That year, David O. Selznick borrowed Ratoff from Fox to direct Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939), after the original director, William Wyler, had departed following a dispute with Selznick. The film marked the American debut of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and co-starred Leslie Howard. Bergman reportedly found Ratoff difficult to follow, as both were navigating English at the time, though Ratoff described her to Life magazine as sensational. Ratoff left Fox in 1941 for a directing contract at Columbia, where he worked across a range of genres including comedies, musicals, crime dramas, war films, and thrillers. He was loaned to MGM for Song of Russia (1944), a musical romance set in Russia at the outset of the Nazi invasion starring Robert Taylor and Susan Peters, but collapsed near the end of shooting and was replaced by Laszlo Benedek.

Ratoff returned to acting and took on his most celebrated screen role as the befuddled producer Max Fabian in All About Eve (1950). He also directed the Broadway play The Fifth Season, which was a hit. Outside the United States, he produced, directed, and starred in the English comedy Abdulla the Great (1955), playing a Middle Eastern potentate, though the film was a failure. His low-budget production Oscar Wilde (1960) earned praise for Robert Morley in the title role and for Ralph Richardson as the barrister who cross-examines Wilde. Ratoff was also one of two producers, along with Michael Garrison, who purchased and developed the original rights to the James Bond franchise from Ian Fleming in 1955, a transaction that later became the subject of a prolonged legal dispute. One of his final acting appearances was in Otto Preminger's epic Exodus (1960), a director with whom Ratoff had first worked in the early 1930s. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 1960, months before his death.

Ratoff died in Solothurn, Switzerland, and his body was returned to the United States for burial at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, New York. He had divorced Leontovich in 1949 and was survived by his second wife, Maria Ratoff.