The Way Andrew Ruhemann Sees It

Co-founder and MD of Oscar-winning film company Passion Pictures, Andrew Ruhemann wanted to be an actor, trained as a singer and developed a love of storytelling through listening to tales about his heroic grandfather, a Romanian prince. He tells Joe Lancaster about the joys of twitching in London and the sorrows of working under pressure with a severed spinal cord.

I was born in London in 1963 to refugee parents who met here. My dad’s father was Jewish and his family got out of Germany in 1933, just in time. My mum’s parents were a Romanian prince and princess. In 1940, when my mother was eight, my grandfather sent his family to England with only what they could carry but he stayed behind, intending to follow after the war, but the communist regime closed the borders. He never made it out. He tried to escape several times but was put in a labour camp on the Danube Delta, where he died.

It had a huge impact on my upbringing. There was always a sense of loss. Even though both my parents got to Cambridge University and did incredibly well to go from having nothing when they arrived in England to achieving a firm middle-class foothold, they never lost that sense of having left things behind.

My mother’s father is kind of a hero figure in Romania and all the fantastical stories – of escapes and attempted escapes – that I’d hear as a kid, I’m sure started my love of storytelling and fantasy, of creating worlds.

My dad’s father was a top restorer of paintings and worked for the National Gallery. During the war he looked after their paintings in caves in Gloucestershire and Wales and after the war he restored them. I remember him in our house with the the Laughing Cavalier under his arm.

My earliest memories are of when I was two or three years old and my grandmother pushed me around St John’s Wood in a pram, telling me stories of the Great Train Robbery. One of the robbers [Roy James, the Weasel] was found hiding out in a house on our road, Ryders Terrace, and I found that very frightening. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I was pretty sensitive and vulnerable early on.

I thought I was destined to become an actor. I excelled at it at school but I studied French and Drama at Bristol University and lost my confidence because I was surrounded by people who I thought were better than me technically. I also realised that acting could potentially be a miserable career.

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