Raoul Walsh

Raoul Walsh (1887-1980), long-serving American director of action and crime films. He was a first-generation Irish-American, born in New York, the son of Elizabeth and Thomas Walsh, who had prospered in the rag trade. After the death of his mother when he was 15, Walsh went to sea, fetching up in Havana where he learned to be a cowhand, and then joined a cattle drive from Mexico to Texas. He started acting in 1910, appearing in the stage play The Clansman by Thomas E. Dixon, and began winning parts in films. He became an assistant to the director D. W. Griffith in Hollywood, where he acted in and co-directed The Life of General Villa (1914), about the Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa, and played John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). This led to a contract with the Fox Film Corporation, for whom he directed one of the earliest gangster films, Regeneration (1915), set in New York’s Bowery slum district.

Walsh proved a reliable director of silent era action dramas and enjoyed his first major Hollywood hit with the lavish epic The Thief of Bagdad (1924), starring Douglas Fairbanks. After adapting and then directing the play What Price Glory? to huge success in 1926, Walsh continued in front of the camera (alongside Gloria Swanson) in Sadie Thompson (1928), from a story by W. Somerset Maugham. However, his acting career ended prematurely when he lost an eye in a car crash while filming Fox’s first talkie, In Old Arizona (1929).

In the early 1930s Walsh’s best work embraced Westerns (The Big Trail, 1930; starring a young John Wayne), drama (The Yellow Ticket, 1931), and exuberant comedy (Me and My Gal, 1932; The Bowery, 1933); while in the late 1930s he joined Warner Bros. and enjoyed his most fertile creative period with a string of classic genre films starring the likes of Mae West, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Errol Flynn: The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive By Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), Desperate Journey (1942), and Northern Pursuit (1943). Among Walsh’s considerable oeuvre of some 130 films, probably the best remembered is the gangster/film noir White Heat (1949), starring Cagney as the psychotic mother-fixated gangster, Cody Jarrett, who dies in a torrent of flames with the words, 'Made it, Ma! Top of the world!'

Walsh was married to the actress Miriam Cooper (1916-1926). His autobiography is Each Man in his Time; The Life Story of a Director (1974).