Raoul Walsh (born March 11, 1887 in New York City, died December 31, 1980 in Simi Valley, CA) was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the brother of silent screen actor George Walsh.

Walsh began his entertainment career as a stage actor in New York City, quickly progressing into film acting. In 1914, he became an assistant to D.W. Griffith and made his first full-length feature film The Life of General Villa, followed by the newly-revisited and critically-acclaimed Regeneration in 1915, possibly the earliest gangster film. Walsh played John Wilkes Booth in Griffith's epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). Walsh directed The Thief of Bagdad in 1924, starring Douglas Fairbanks and Anna May Wong.

In 1928 Ford directed Sadie Thompson, starring Gloria Swanson as a prostitute seeking a new life in Samoa. Walsh not only directed the film but starred as Swanson's boyfriend. It was his first acting role since 1915. Walsh was then hired to direct and star in In Old Arizona, a film about The Cisco Kid. While on location for that film Walsh suffered a car accident in which he lost his right eye. He gave up the part (but not the directing job), and never acted again. Walsh would wear an eyepatch for the rest of his life.

In the early days of sound with Fox, Walsh directed the first widescreen spectacle, The Big Trail in 1930, a wagon train western shot on location across the West. It starred then unknown John Wayne, whom Walsh discovered as prop boy Marion Morrison and renamed after Revolutionary War general Mad Anthony Wayne (Walsh happened to be reading a book about General Wayne at the time). Walsh directed The Bowery in 1933, featuring Wallace Beery, George Raft, Fay Wray, and Pert Kelton; the movie recounts the story of Steve Brodie, the first man to supposedly jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and live to brag about it.

An undistinguished period followed with Paramount Pictures from 1935 to 1939, but Walsh's career rose to new heights soon after moving to Warner Brothers, with The Roaring Twenties (1939) featuring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart; Dark Command (1940) with John Wayne and Roy Rogers; They Drive By Night (1940) with George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, and Bogart; High Sierra (1941) with Lupino and Bogart again; They Died with Their Boots On (1941) with Errol Flynn as Custer; Manpower (1941) with Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, and George Raft; and White Heat (1949) with Cagney. Walsh's contract at Warners expired in 1953.

He directed several films afterwards, including two with Clark Gable, The Tall Men (1955) and The King and Four Queens (1956). Walsh retired in 1964.

Raoul Walsh's 52-year directorial career made him a Hollywood legend, and the slam-band nature of his best films means that he is still remembered while the memory of Allan Dwan, a director with an equally long career, has practically faded from public consciousness. Walsh was also an actor: He appeared in the first version of W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain" opposite Gloria Swanson as Sadie Thompson (1928) and would have played The Cisco Kid in his own film In Old Arizona (1928) if an errant jackrabbit hadn't cost him an eye by leaping through the windshield of his automobile. (Warner Baxter filled the role and won an Oscar.) Before John Ford (I) and Nicholas Ray, it was Raoul Walsh who made the eye-patch almost as synonymous with a Hollywood director as Cecil B. DeMille's jodhpurs. He interned with the best, serving as Assistant Director and editor on D.W. Griffith's racist masterpiece "The Clansman, better known as Birth of a Nation, The (1915), a blockbuster that may have been the highest-grossing film of all time if accurate box office records had been kept before the sound era. He pulled triple duty on that picture, playing John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln (I) at Ford's Theater and ranked as the most notorious American actor of all time until Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) did his thing in a theater. The year before "The Clansman," Walsh had been the second unit director on Life of General Villa, The (1914), also playing the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (I) as a young man. Walsh had gotten his start in the business as co-director of another Pancho Villa flick, Life of General Villa, The (1914), in 1912. The movie featured footage shot of an actually battle between Villa's forces and Mexican federal troops. In 1915, in addition to helping out the great Griffith, Walsh directed no less than 14 films, including his first feature-length film, Regeneration (1915), which he also wrote. The movie, which stared silent cinema superstar Anna Q. Nilsson as a society woman turned social worker who aids the regeneration of a Bowery gang leader, is a melodrama, but an effective one. In his autobiography, Walsh credited D.W. Griffith with "teaching" him about the art of filmmaking and about production management techniques. The film is memorable for its shots of New York City, where Walsh had been born 28 years earlier, on March 11, 1887. Raoul Walsh would continue to be a top director for 40 years and would not hang up his director's megaphone (if he still had one at that late in the game) until 1964. As a writer, his last script was made in 1970, meaning his career as a whole spanned seven decades and 58 years. He introduced the world to John Wayne (I) in Big Trail, The (1930) in 70mm wide-screen in 1930 (it would take nine more years and John Ford (I) to make the Duke a star). In one three-year period at Warner Bros., he directed Roaring Twenties, The (1939), They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), Strawberry Blonde, The (1941), Manpower (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), and Gentleman Jim (1942), among other films in that time frame. He helped consolidate the stardom of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn (I) while directing the great James Cagney in one of his more delightful films (Strawberry Blonde, The (1941)). This was the same director that would elicit Cagney's most searing performance since Public Enemy, The (1931) in the crime classic White Heat (1949). Novelist Norman Mailer says that Walsh was dragged off of his death bed to direct the underrated film adaptation of Mailer's Naked and the Dead, The (1958). The movie is as masculine and unsentimental as the book, an exceedingly harsh look at the power relations between men at war on the same side that includes the attempted murder of prisoners of war and the "fragging" of officers (Sergeant Croft allows his lieutenant to walk into an ambush). Walsh was at his best when directing men in war or action pictures. Raoul Walsh seemingly recovered from Mailer's phantasmagorical death bed, as he lived another 32 years after Naked and the Dead, The (1958). He died on December 31, 1980, in Simi Valley, California, at the age of 93.