The son of a Czarist diplomat, Anatole de Grunwald was barely seven
years old when his family fled the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Educated
at Cambridge and the Sorbonne, de Grunwald worked for several years
as a print journalist in Britain, turning to screenwriting in 1939.
After functioning on the production staff of Two Cities Films, de Grunwald
and his younger brother Dmitri formed their own independent production
company in 1946, producing such films as Libel
(1959), The Queen
of Spades (1949) and Now Barabbas Was a Robber (1949).
Keeping his hand in the writing game, de Grunwald contributed to the
scripts of many of his productions, including French
Without Tears (1940), co-written with Terence Rattigan for Anthony
Asquith, a collaboration repeated on Quiet
Wedding (1941), The
Way to the Stars (1945), While
the Sun Shines (1947) and The
Winslow Boy (1948). He was involved as writer with director Harold
French on Jeannie (1941), Secret Mission (1942), The
Day Will Dawn (1942) and English Without Tears (1944). Anatole de
Grunwald's final film efforts included the star-studded The
V.I.P.'s (1963) and The
Yellow Rolls Royce (1965).
