Gregory Gaye

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Gregory Grigoriovitch De Gaye (born September 27 . Jul / 10. October  1900 greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 23. August 1993 in Studio City , California ) was a Russian - American actor.

Life

Born in Saint Petersburg, Gregory Gaye served as a cadet in the Royal Russian Navy in his youth. After fighting for Tsar Nicholas against the Bolshevik army , he fled to the United States via the Republic of China in 1917 after the October Revolution . In the 1920s, Gaye met exiles from Russia who were active in the film business and who gave him his first smaller roles in the late 1920s. In the following decades Gaye was to play in over 100 films as well as numerous television series, whereby he was mostly cast on authoritarian or aristocratic Eastern Europeans. In 1936 he played the elegant Baron von Obersdorf in William Wyler's love drama Time of Love, Time of Farewell, and the Italian opera singer Enrico Barelli in the crime film Charlie Chan in the opera . A year later he played alongside Claudette Colbert and Basil Rathbone a Russian count in Tovarich . In 1939, under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch in Ninotschka, he portrayed the Russian nobleman Alexis Rakonin, who had to work as a waiter in exile in Paris .

During the Second World War, Gaye increasingly focused on portraying German National Socialists. In Casablanca (1942), for example, he played the threatening German banker who was turned away by Rick Blaine ( Humphrey Bogart ) at the door of his café. He played another villain banker in Cornered in 1945 alongside Dick Powell and Walter Slezak . While his film roles were mostly small from the 1950s, he also regularly took on guest roles on television. In the 1955 television series Commando Cody , he played a power-hungry alien who threatens the world's population in about twelve episodes. Gaye's later film roles included a mad Nazi scientist in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the biography Hitler (1962). From the end of the 1960s he was only sparsely in front of the camera, in 1979 he had his last small role as Russian Prime Minister in Meteor .

In 1985, Gaye's second wife, Frances Lee, died after a marriage of over 40 years. He himself died of old age in 1993 at the age of 92. His nephew was the well-known actor George Gaynes (1917-2016).

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Obituary for Gregory Gaye in the Los Angeles Times
  2. ^ Gregory Gaye at Allmovie
personal data
SURNAME Gaye, Gregory
ALTERNATIVE NAMES De Gaye, Gregory Grigoriovitch (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Petersburg , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH 23rd August 1993
Place of death Studio City , Los Angeles , California