He graduated to Broadway later in the decade, appearing in Shubert productions as he learned English, though his mastery of the language always was heavily accented and this, in fact, became his stock-in-trade in his busy future career as a character actor.

[citation needed] When the Depression hit Broadway, Ratoff headed to Hollywood, as part of the exodus of New York theater pros who were quickly snapped up by producers terrified of films with dialogue, the "talkies".

He arrived in 1931 and caught a lucky break: in Gregory La Cava's Symphony of Six Million, producer David O. Selznick had insisted, very unusually for the time, that this Fannie Hurst story of a brilliant Jewish doctor escaping his tenement roots be cast with authentic Yiddish actors from the Lower East Side.

[4] His role as the beloved immigrant father who dies on his son's operating table led to five more jobs in quick succession, ranging from a George Kaufman comedy to a prestigious Selznick production, What Price Hollywood?

With these early critical and box-office winners, Ratoff was in constant demand as a character actor throughout the 1930s, many in B-pictures but increasingly with young directors who later had important careers.

Due to his large frame and uncertain command of English, he was often typecast as a villain in an American setting or as a foreigner in the dozens of 1930s films that recreated a glamorous fictional Europe on the Hollywood backlot.

He followed with his first screenwriting effort, Cafe Metropole (1937), and soon directed on his own with Lancer Spy (1937), starring Peter Lorre, Dolores del Río and George Sanders.

[citation needed] For the next decade, Ratoff directed comedies, musicals, crime dramas, war films, thrillers and swashbucklers—all solid but unspectacular fare in the wide range of genres then given to directors under contract.

Ratoff's directing career in Hollywood never recovered, and he returned to acting, playing his most famous role as the befuddled producer Max Fabian in All About Eve.

The English comedy Abdulla the Great (1955), which he produced, directed, and starred in as a Middle Eastern potentate, proved a complete failure, but his low-budget film of Jo Eisinger's play Oscar Wilde (1960) won plaudits for Robert Morley in the title role, while Ralph Richardson was commended for his role as the barrister who destroys Wilde on the witness stand.

[6][7] He was one of the two producers (with Michael Garrison[8]) to have purchased and developed the original rights to the James Bond franchise from Ian Fleming in 1955, which subsequently became the subject of a bitter legal dispute.