Edmond T. Gréville was a French film director and screenwriter.

The son of Franco-British parents, his father a Protestant pastor, 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

René Clair

René Clair born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker.-Biography:He was born in Paris and grew up in the Les Halles quarter. He attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. During World War I, he served as an ambulance driver. After the war, he started a career as a journalist...

, Sous les toits de Paris

Under the Roofs of Paris

Under the Roofs of Paris is a 1930 French film directed by René Clair. It was probably the earliest French example of a filmed musical-comedy, although its often dark tone differentiates it from other instances of the genre...

(1930), he directed his first short films. His first experience of directing had been on the shooting of Abel Gance

Abel Gance

Abel Gance was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. He is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse , La Roue , and the monumental Napoléon .-Early life:...

's Napoléon in 1927. He had then worked as an assistant director, notably on the English film Piccadilly

Piccadilly (film)

Piccadilly is a British film directed by Ewald André Dupont, written by Arnold Bennett and starring Gilda Gray, Anna May Wong, and Jameson Thomas. The film was produced by British International Pictures and released by Wardour Films Ltd...

, L'Arlésienne (directed by Jacques de Baroncelli

Jacques de Baroncelli

Jacques de Baroncelli was a French film director best known for his silent films from 1915 to the late 1930s....

), Augusto Genina

Augusto Genina

Augusto Genina was an Italian film pioneer. He was a movie producer and director.Born in Rome, Genina was a drama critic and wrote comedies for the Il Mondo Magazine, under advise of Aldo de Benedetti switches to movies for the "Film d'Arte Italiana", that produces his first film "La moglie di sua...

's Prix de beauté

Prix de Beauté

Prix de Beauté , is a 1930 film directed by Augusto Genina. It is notable for being the first sound film made by Louise Brooks, although all of her dialogue and singing were dubbed.-Plot:...

( with Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks

Mary Louise Brooks , generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W...

) and Abel Gance's La Fin du Monde

End of the World (1931 film)

End of the World is a 1931 science fiction film directed by Abel Gance based on the novel Omega: The Last Days of the World by Camille Flammarion. The film stars Victor Francen as Martial Novalic, Colette Darfeuil as Genevieve de Murcie, Abel Gance as Jean Novalic, and Jeanne Brindau as Madame...

.

Between 1930 and 1940 he directed several French films - Le Train des suicidés (1931), Remous (1934) with Françoise Rosay

Françoise Rosay

Françoise Rosay was a French opera singer, diseuse, and actress who enjoyed a film career of over sixty years and who became a legendary figure in French cinema...

 (a social-realist film on the sensitive sexual issue of impotence), and two comedy musical films Princesse Tam Tam (1935) with Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker was an American dancer, singer, and actress who found fame in her adopted homeland of France. She was given such nicknames as the "Bronze Venus", the "Black Pearl", and the "Créole Goddess"....

, and Gypsy Melody (1936), with Lupe Vélez

Lupe Vélez

Lupe Vélez was a Mexican film actress. Vélez began her career in Mexico as a dancer, before moving to the U.S. where she worked in vaudeville. She was seen by Fanny Brice who promoted her, and Vélez soon entered films, making her first appearance in 1924. By the end of the decade she had...

. In Britain again, he filmed Mademoiselle Docteur with Dita Parlo

Dita Parlo

Dita Parlo was a German film actress.Born Grethe Gerda Kornstädt in Stettin , Parlo made her first film appearance in Homecoming in 1928 and quickly became a popular actress in Germany...

 and John Loder

John Loder (actor)

John Loder was a British-American actor. He was born William John Muir Lowe in London.-Early life:Loder's father was General W. H. M. Lowe, the British officer to whom Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Ireland, surrendered...

, and Menaces (1938) with Mireille Balin and Erich von Stroheim

Erich von Stroheim

Erich von Stroheim was an Austrian-born film star of the silent era, subsequently noted as an auteur for his directorial work.-Background:...

, playing an Austrian refugee who commits suicide following the Anschluss

Anschluss

The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....

. With a heavy atmosphere charged with eroticism which characterises his films, Gréville imposed his independence and original style on the cinema of the time.

He stopped directing films during the Second World War and the Occupation - xenophobia

Xenophobia

Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange". It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear."...

 and anti-Semitism ruined or put a stop to some careers, among film-makers those of Léonide Moguy

Léonide Moguy

Léonide Moguy was a Russian born French film director, screenwriter and film editor .He was active in film between 1936 and 1961.-Personal life:...

 and Pierre Chenal

Pierre Chenal

Pierre Chenal was a French director and screenwriter who flourished in the 1930s, and was best known for film noir thrillers such as the 1937 film L’Alibi, where he worked with Erich von Stroheim and Louis Jouvet. In 1939 he made Le Dernier Tournant, the first of many film treatments of James M...

 for example, both French Jews, and the half-British Gréville, and took away production and distribution companies belonging to Jews like the father and son distributors Siriztky. In 1948 he made a film on the subject of resistance and collaboration in the Anglo-Dutch film Niet tevergeefs/But Not in Vain

But Not in Vain

But Not in Vain is a 1948 Anglo-Dutch World War II drama, directed by Edmond T. Gréville and starring Raymond Lovell. The film is set in 1944 in the occupied Netherlands, and was shot at the Cinetone Studios in Amsterdam, with exterior filming taking place at locations in and around the city...

. The same year he made a film with Carole Landis

Carole Landis

Carole Landis was an American film and stage actress whose break-through role was as the female lead in the 1940 film One Million B.C.. Landis has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 1765 Vine Street....

, Noose

Noose (film)

Noose is a British crime film released in 1948. It was directed by Edmond T. Gréville and starred Carole Landis and Derek Farr.-Plot:Set in post Second World War Britain, Noose is the story of black market racketeers who face attempts to bring them to justice by an American fashion journalist, her...

. In Le Port du désir (1954) he directed Jean Gabin

Jean Gabin

-Biography:Born Jean-Alexis Moncorgé in Paris, he grew up in the village of Mériel in the Seine-et-Oise département, about 22 mi north of Paris. The son of cabaret entertainers, he attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly...

 as a captain confronted by an unscrupulous smuggler and torn by his love for a young woman who is also loved by a younger man.

In Gréville's last years he made Beat Girl

Beat Girl

Beat Girl is a 1960 British film about late-fifties youth-rebellion. The title character is played by starlet Gillian Hills, who later went on to have numerous small roles in 1960s and 1970s films, such as Blowup and A Clockwork Orange, and became a successful "ye-ye" singer in France.The music was...

(1959) with Adam Faith

Adam Faith

Terence "Terry" Nelhams-Wright, known as Adam Faith was a Teen idol English singer, actor and later financial journalist. He was one of the most charted acts of the 1960s. He became the first UK artist to lodge his initial seven hits in the Top 5...

 and a horror film The Hands of Orlac (1960) with Mel Ferrer

Mel Ferrer

Mel Ferrer was an American actor, film director and film producer.-Early life:Ferrer was born Melchor Gastón Ferrer in Elberon, New Jersey, of Catalan and Irish descent. His father, Dr. José María Ferrer , was born in Cuba, was an authority on pneumonia and served as chief of staff of St....

. His last film was L'Accident (1963) with Magali Noël

Magali Noël

Magali Noël is a Turkish-French actress and singer. Originally from Izmir, she emigrated from Turkey to France in 1951, and her acting career began soon thereafter. She acted in multilingual cinema chiefly from 1951 to 1980, doing several films in Italian with renowned director Federico Fellini,...

based on a Frédéric David novel.

In May 1966, Edmond Greville died in hospital in Nice, thought to be the result of complications following a car accident.