Raoul Walsh

Raoul Walsh (born Albert Edward Walsh, 1887 to 1980) was an American film director, actor and founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the brother of silent cinema actor George Walsh. Born in New York to an Irish Catholic immigrant mother and an English father, he began as an actor and played John Wilkes Booth in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). He lost his right eye when a jackrabbit crashed through his windshield during the making of In Old Arizona, gave up acting and wore an eyepatch for life. He directed The Thief of Bagdad (1924) with Douglas Fairbanks and, at Warner Bros., The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1941) and White Heat (1949). He retired in 1964.