Robert Aldrich (August 9, 1918 - December 5, 1983) was an American film director, writer, and producer notable for films such as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Flight of the Phoenix, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and The Dirty Dozen.

Robert Burgess Aldrich was born in Cranston, Rhode Island, the son of Lora Lawson and newspaper publisher Edward B. Aldrich; a grandson of U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich and a cousin to Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. He was educated at the Moses Brown School, Providence, Rhode Island, and studied economics at the University of Virginia. In 1941, he left university for a minor job at the RKO studio, thus beginning his career as a cineáste.

He quickly rose in film production as an assistant director, he worked with Jean Renoir, Abraham Polonsky, Joseph Losey, and Charlie Chaplin. He became a television director in the 1950s, directing his first feature film, The Big Leaguer, in 1954. In that time, Robert Aldrich was the rare American example of the auteur film maker, depicting his liberal humanist thematic vision in many genres, in films such as Kiss Me Deadly (1955), today a film noir classic, The Big Knife (1955), a cinematic adaptation of Clifford Odets's play about Hollywood as a business, Attack (1956), a World War II infantry combat film exploring the U.S. Army's corporate careerism, and how social class and caste determine who attack and who order the attack.

In the 1960s he directed several commercially successful films, such as the gothic horror story What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as spiteful sisters and faded child-actresses; the sexually controversial The Killing of Sister George (1968); and the war movie formula template, The Dirty Dozen (1967). The success of The Dirty Dozen allowed him to establish his own film production studio for some time, but several failures forced his professional return to conventionally commercial Hollywood films. Nevertheless, his liberal humanism is thematically evident in The Longest Yard (1974), about the corporate, cut-throat values of rigged-game Nixonian America, and Ulzana's Raid (1972) about the post–Civil War extermination of the Indians in the course of settling the West for white people. Thematically, Ulzana's Raid details the psychological and cultural tolls paid by the soldiers who must kill everyone impeding the establishment of empire.

Personally, in marriage to Harriet Foster, Robert Aldrich had four children, all of whom work in the movie business: Adell Aldrich, William Aldrich, Alida Aldrich, and Kelly Aldrich. In 1965, after divorcing his first wife, Harriet, he married fashion model Sybille Siegfried.

Robert Aldrich entered the film industry in 1941 when he got a job as a production clerk at RKO Pictures. He soon worked his way up to script clerk, then became an assistant director, a production manager and an associate producer. He began writing and directing for TV series in the early 1950s, and directed his first feature in 1953 (Big Leaguer (1953)). Soon thereafter he established his own production company and produced most of his own films, collaborating in the writing of many of them. Among his best-known pictures are Kiss Me Deadly (1955), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and the muscular WW II mega-hit Dirty Dozen, The (1967).