Michael Robert Winner (30 October 1935 – 21 January 2013) was a British filmmaker, writer, and media personality. He is known for directing numerous action, thriller, and black comedy films in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, including several collaborations with actors Oliver Reed and Charles Bronson.

Winner's best-known works include Death Wish (1974) and its first two sequels Death Wish II (1982) and Death Wish 3 (1985), the World War II comedy Hannibal Brooks (1969), the hitman thriller The Mechanic (1972), the supernatural horror film The Sentinel (1977), the neo-noir The Big Sleep (1978), the satirical comedy Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976), and the Revisionist Westerns Lawman (1971) and Chato's Land (1972).

Winner was known as a media personality in the United Kingdom, appearing regularly on television talk programmes and publishing a restaurant review column for The Sunday Times. He was also a founder of the Police Memorial Trust.

Winner was born at 40 Belsize Grove, Belsize Park, Hampstead, London, the only child of Jewish parents George Joseph Winner (1910–1975), of Russian-Jewish origin, and Helen (née Zlota; January 1906 – May 1984), who was born in Poland. His mother had emigrated to the UK in 1932 with her parents and a brother, and later anglicised her name from ‘Chana Rosa’ to ‘Helen Rose’. His father - who was a Freemason and belonged to the same Masonic Lodge as Tommy Cooper - was a businessman and company director responsible for running a branch of the Winner's clothing chain founded by his father, who became a naturalised British citizen in 1910. His mother died at the age of 78, in 1984.

Winner was educated at St Christopher School, Letchworth, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he read law and economics. He also edited the university's student newspaper, Varsity, and was the youngest ever editor up to that time, both in age and in terms of his university career (being only in the second term of his second year). Winner had earlier written a newspaper column, "Michael Winner's Showbiz Gossip", in the Kensington Post from the age of fourteen. The first issue of Showgirl Glamour Revue in 1955 had him writing another film and show-business gossip column, "Winner's World". Such jobs allowed him to meet and interview several leading film personalities, including James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. He also wrote for the New Musical Express.

Winner claimed in his memoirs that he avoided National Service by pretending to be gay.

Winner directed his first travelogue, This is Belgium (1957), which was largely shot on location in East Grinstead. It was financed by his father. Later, he wrote, produced and directed a short, The Square (1957), starring A. E. Matthews, and which again was financed by Winner's father.

Winner's first on-screen feature credit was earned as a writer for the low-budget crime film Man with a Gun (1958) directed by Montgomery Tully. He went on to direct the shorts Danger, Women at Work (1959) and Watch the Birdie (1959), and was Associate Producer on Floating Fortress (1959), produced by Harold Baim.