Peter Wilton Cushing (26 May 1913 – 11 August 1994) was an English actor. His acting career spanned over six decades and included appearances in more than 100 films, as well as many television, stage and radio roles. He achieved recognition for his leading performances in the Hammer Productions horror films from the 1950s to 1970s and as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (1977).

Born in Kenley, Surrey, Cushing made his stage debut in 1935 and spent three years at a repertory theatre before moving to Hollywood to pursue a film career. After making his motion-picture debut in the film The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), Cushing began to find modest success in American films before returning to England at the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite performing in a string of roles, including one as Osric in Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of Hamlet (1948), Cushing struggled to find work during this period. His career was revitalised once he started to work in live television plays and he soon became one of the most recognisable faces in British television. He earned particular acclaim for his lead performance as Winston Smith in a BBC adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954).

Cushing gained worldwide fame for his appearances in twenty-two horror films from the Hammer studio, particularly for his role as Baron Frankenstein in six of their seven Frankenstein films and Doctor Van Helsing in five Dracula films. Cushing often appeared alongside the actor Christopher Lee, who became one of his closest friends, and occasionally with the American horror star Vincent Price. Cushing appeared in several other Hammer films, including The Abominable Snowman (1957), The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles (both 1959), the last of which marked the first of the several occasions he portrayed the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Cushing continued to perform in a variety of roles, although he was often typecast as a horror film actor. He played Dr. Who in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966), and became even better known through his part in the original Star Wars film. Cushing continued acting into the early to mid-1990s and wrote two autobiographies.

Peter Wilton Cushing was born in Kenley, then a village in the English county of Surrey, on 26 May 1913 to George Edward Cushing (1881–1956) and Nellie Marie (née King) Cushing (1882–1961). His father, a quantity surveyor, was a reserved and uncommunicative man whom Peter said he never got to know very well. His mother was the daughter of a carpet merchant and considered of a lower class than her husband. Cushing's family consisted of several stage actors, including his paternal grandfather, Henry William Cushing (who toured with Henry Irving), his paternal aunt Maude Cushing (his father's sister) and his step-uncle Wilton Herriot, after whom Peter Cushing received his middle name.

The Cushing family lived in Dulwich during the First World War, but moved to Purley after the war ended in 1918. Although raised during wartime, Cushing was too young to understand or become greatly affected by it, and was shielded from the horrors of war by his mother, who encouraged him to play games under the kitchen table whenever the threat of possible bombings arose. In his infancy, Cushing twice developed pneumonia and once what was then known as "double pneumonia". The latter was often fatal during that period, although he survived. During one Christmas in his youth, Cushing saw a stage production of Peter Pan, which served as an early source of inspiration and interest in acting. Cushing loved dressing up and make believe from an early age, and later claimed he always wanted to be an actor, "perhaps without knowing at first." A fan of comics and toy collectibles in his youth, Cushing earned money by staging puppet shows for family members with his glove-puppets and toys.

He began his early education in Dulwich, south London, before attending Shoreham Grammar School in Shoreham-by-Sea, on the Sussex coast between Brighton and Worthing. Prone to homesickness, he was miserable at the boarding school and spent only one term there before returning home. He attended Purley County Grammar School, where he swam and played cricket and rugby. With the exception of art, Cushing was a self-proclaimed poor student in most subjects and had little attention span for that which did not interest him. He got fair grades only through the help of his brother, a strong student who did his homework for him. Cushing harboured aspirations for the arts all throughout his youth, especially acting. His childhood inspiration was Tom Mix, an American film actor and star of many Western films. D.J. Davies, the Purley County Grammar School physics teacher who produced all the school's plays, recognised some acting potential in him and encouraged him to participate in the theatre, even allowing Cushing to skip class to paint sets. He played the lead in nearly every school production during his teenage years, including the role of Sir Anthony Absolute in a 1929 staging of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy of manners play, The Rivals.

Cushing wanted to enter the acting profession after school, but his father opposed the idea, despite the theatrical background of several of his family members. Instead, seizing upon Cushing's interest in art and drawing, he got his son a job as a surveyor's assistant in the drawing department of the Coulsdon and Purley Urban District Council's surveyor's office during the summer of 1933. Cushing hated the job, where he remained for three years without promotion or advancement due to his lack of ambition in the profession. The only enjoyment he got out of it was drawing perspectives of proposed buildings, which were almost always rejected because they were too imaginative and expensive and lacked strong foundations, which Cushing disregarded as a "mere detail."

Thanks to his former teacher Davies, Cushing continued to appear in school productions during this time, as well as amateur plays such as W. S. Gilbert's Pygmalion and Galatea, George Kelly's The Torch-Bearers, and The Red Umbrella, by Brenda Girvin and Monica Cosens. Cushing often learned and practised his lines in an attic at work, under the guise that he was putting ordnance survey maps into order. He regularly applied for auditions and openings for roles he found in the arts-oriented newspaper The Stage, but was turned down repeatedly due to his lack of professional experience in the theatre.