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. As a young man he was a close friend of Virginia O'Hanlon of "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" fame.
Walsh began his entertainment career as a stage actor in New York City, quickly progressing into film acting. Walsh was educated at Seton Hall College and began acting in 1909. 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) for which he was also Assistant Director. 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.
Walsh unofficially co-directed The Enforcer, with Humphrey Bogart and Zero Mostel, when director Bretaigne Windust fell ill at the beginning of shooting in 1951. Walsh refused to take a screen credit.
