Anatole de Grunwald

Who was Anatole de Grunwald?

Anatole "Tolly" de Grunwald was a Russian British film producer and screenwriter.

Anatole de Grunwald was born in Petrograd, Russia, the son of a diplomat in the service of Tsar Nicholas II. He was seven years old when his father was forced to flee with his family to England during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He grew up in England, studied at Cambridge and the Sorbonne and started a career as a journalist. He turned to screenwriting in 1939 for the British film industry, then became a producer.

He was appointed managing director of Two Cities Films, and later formed his own production company with his brother, Dimitri De Grunwald in 1946. De Grunwald contributed to the scripts of many of his productions, including The Winslow Boy and The Holly and the Ivy. Most of his films were British productions, although in the 1960s he did venture to the United States to produce a few films, then returned to England for the remainder of his career. Anatole de Grunwald's final film efforts included The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. He worked in close collaboration with the director Anthony Asquith and the dramatist Terence Rattigan, with whom he made several films.