Edmond T. Gréville

Edmond T. Gréville (real name Edmond Gréville Thonger, 20 June 1906 Nice – 26 May 1966, Nice) was a French film director and screenwriter. He was married to the actress Vanda Gréville.

Born in June 1906, the adopted son of Franco-British parents, it was subsequently discovered through the 23andMe genetic testing of his daughter and grandson in 2017, that he was in fact, Ashkenazim Jewish from the likely area of Odessa, based on the present whereabouts of his closest genetic relations today. Family speculation suggests that his parents fled the 1905 Russian pogrom to Marseilles, where he may have been discovered in the Nice hospital his English father, a Salvation Army colonel and Protestant pastor, was associated with. His true origin and that of his parents, remains a mystery.

Gréville began his career as a film journalist and critic. In parallel with a few acting performances in some silent films and in the first talkie of René Clair, Sous les toits de Paris (1930), he directed his first short films. His first experience of directing had been on the shooting of Abel Gance's Napoléon in 1927. He had then worked as an assistant director, notably on the English film Piccadilly, L'Arlésienne (directed by Jacques de Baroncelli), Augusto Genina's Miss Europe (with Louise Brooks) and Abel Gance's La Fin du Monde.

Between 1930 and 1940 he directed several French films:

In Britain again, he filmed Under Secret Orders (1937) with Dita Parlo and John Loder (1937), the English-language version of G. W. Pabst's Mademoiselle Docteur. Gréville also directed Menaces (1938) with Mireille Balin and Erich von Stroheim, with von Stroheim playing an Austrian refugee who commits suicide following the Anschluss. With a heavy atmosphere charged with eroticism which characterizes his films, Gréville imposed his independence and original style on the cinema of the time.

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