Gregory Ratoff

Gregory Ratoff (born Grigory Vasilyevich Ratner; , tr. ; April 20, c. 1893 – December 14, 1960) was a Russian-born American film director, actor and producer. As an actor, he was best known for his role as producer "Max Fabian" in All About Eve (1950). Biography Ratoff was born in Samara, Russia, to Jewish parents. His mother was Sophie (née Markison) who claimed to have been born on September 1, 1878, but was married on June 14, 1894, when she would have been 15, to Benjamin Ratner (born 1864), with whom she had four children, the eldest of whom was Grigory, whose date of birth she gave as April 7, 1895 but later April 20 was cited as Gregory Ratoff's birthdate, and the year given as 1893, 1896 and 1897, variously. Sophie Ratner later adopted her son's stage surname (Ratoff) when she herself became a naturalized United States citizen. Sophie Ratoff died on August 27, 1955. Her date of birth is given as September 13, 1877 in the California Death Index (1940–1997), 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. Although his father's name was Benjamin, Gregory adopted the less Jewish-sounding patronymic of "Vasilyevich". Ratoff was pursuing a law degree at the University of St. Petersburg until his education was interrupted by service in the Czar's army in World War I. After the war, he abandoned law to join the Moscow Art Theater, where he began to make a name for himself as an actor. An eyewitness to the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ratoff fled Russia with his parents in 1922 and settled in Paris, where he wooed Evgenia Konstantinovna Leontovich (later known as actress Eugenie Leontovich), the daughter of a Czarist army officer, who, too, had escaped to Paris. They were both performing in a Paris production of the Russe Revue in 1922 when the New York impresario, Lee Shubert, founder of the Shubert Theaters, brought this show to Broadway, and the young couple along with it. They decided to stay in the United States, and the couple married on January 19, 1923. Leontovich gave Ratoff's year of birth as 1896 in her naturalization papers but did not include the month or day.