De Grunwald was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the son of a diplomat (Constantin de Grunwald) in the service of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. He was seven years old when his father was forced to flee with his family to France during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He grew up in France and England, studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he edited a student magazine, The Europa, and attended the University of Paris (Sorbonne). He started his career in films by reading scripts for Gaumont-British. He then turned to screenwriting in 1939 for the British film industry and eventually became a producer.
He was appointed managing director of Two Cities Films, and later formed his own production company with his brother, Dimitri de Grunwald in 1946. De Grunwald contributed to the scripts of many of his productions, including The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Holly and the Ivy (1952). Most of his films were British productions, although in the 1960s, invited by MGM, he went to the United States where he produced several films, then returned to England for the remainder of his career. Anatole de Grunwald's final films included The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1965). He worked in close collaboration with the director Anthony Asquith and the dramatist Terence Rattigan, with whom he made many films.
