Gregory Ratoff April 20, c. 1893 – December 14, 1960) was a Russian-born American producer, director and actor.
He was one of the two producers (along with Michael Garrison) to have purchased and developed the original rights to the James Bond franchise from Ian Fleming in the 1950s, long before Eon, which subsequently became the subject of a bitter legal dispute.
Ratoff was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 1960, just months before his death in Switzerland. One of his last roles as an actor was in the epic film Exodus (1960), for Otto Preminger, a director with whom he had first worked in the early 1930s.
Biography[]
Gregory Ratoff was born Grigory Vasilyevich Ratner (Russian: Григорий Васильевич Ратнер, (Grigoriy Vasil’evich Ratner)) into a Russian Jewish family. As an actor, he was best known for his role as producer "Max Fabian" in All About Eve (1950).
Ratoff was pursuing a law degree at the University of St. Petersburg until his education was interrupted by service in the Tsar's army in World War I. After the war, he abandoned law to join the Moscow Art Theatre, where he began to make a name for himself as an actor. An eyewitness to the chaos of the Bolsheviks' Russian 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 White Russian (anti-Communist) 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.
Casino Royale involvement[]
Ratoff bought the rights to the Ian Fleming novel Casino Royale in May 1954. It was a six month option and Ratoff took this to CBS whom produced and broadcast a version of Casino Royale as a one hour episode for the series Climax!.
Before the sale, the Casino Royale novel had not been very successful, and was even retitled and Americanised for its paperback issue. Fleming also needed money at the time. Twelve months later, and after the TV screening, Ratoff bought Casino Royale outright in perpetuity for an additional $6000. Both sales including the option and the buy-out are considered to have been sold too cheaply and were two sales that Ian Fleming later regretted. With the money from the larger sale, Ian Fleming bought a Thunderbird car at the cost of £3000.
Gregory Ratoff passed away on 14 December 1960. His widow Eugenie Leontovich sold the rights to Charles K. Feldman in 1961 for $75,000. Feldman would go on to make the James Bond spoof, Casino Royale (1967), with huge divergences from the source material. Casino Royale would not be made as an EON Productions film until over fifty years late with 2006's version — with the setting transferred to the Balkans and the 21st century.