Sir Ridley Scott (born 30 November 1937) is an English filmmaker. His work includes science fiction, crime, and historical epic films, with an atmospheric and highly concentrated visual style. He ranks among the highest-grossing directors, with his films grossing a cumulative $5 billion worldwide. He has received many accolades, including the BAFTA Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in 2018, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003, and appointed a Knight Grand Cross by King Charles III in 2024.

An alumnus of the Royal College of Art in London, Scott began his career in television as a designer and director before moving into advertising as a director of commercials. He made his film directorial debut with The Duellists (1977) and gained wider recognition with his next film, Alien (1979). Though his films range widely in setting and period, they showcase memorable imagery of urban environments, spanning 2nd-century Rome in Gladiator (2000) and its 2024 sequel, 12th-century Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven (2005), medieval England in Robin Hood (2010), ancient Memphis in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), contemporary Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down (2002), futuristic cityscapes of Los Angeles in Blade Runner (1982), and extraterrestrial worlds in Alien, Prometheus (2012), The Martian (2015) and Alien: Covenant (2017).

Scott has been nominated for three Academy Awards for Directing for Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. Gladiator won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and he received a nomination in the same category for The Martian. In 1995, both Scott and his brother Tony received a British Academy Film Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. Scott's films Alien, Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise were each selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being considered "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In a 2004 BBC poll, Scott was ranked 10 on the list of most influential people in British culture. Scott also works in television, and has earned 10 Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He won twice, for Outstanding Television Film for the HBO film The Gathering Storm (2002) and for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special for the History Channel's Gettysburg (2011). He was Emmy-nominated for RKO 281 (1999), The Andromeda Strain (2008), and The Pillars of the Earth (2010).

My mum brought three boys up: my dad was in the army and so he was frequently away. During the war and post-war, we tended to travel following him around so my mum was the boss. She laid down the law and the law was God. We just said, "Yup, okay" – we didn't argue. I think that's where the respect has come from, because she was tough.

Scott was born on 30 November 1937 in South Shields, to Francis ("Frank") Percy Scott, a partner in a commercial shipping business based in Newcastle who would serve as a Colonel in the Royal Engineers during the Second World War, and Elizabeth, née Williams, a miner's daughter. His great-uncle Dixon Scott was a pioneer of the cinema chain and opened many cinemas around Tyneside. One of his cinemas, Tyneside Cinema, is still operating in Newcastle and is the last remaining newsreel cinema in the UK.

Born two years before the Second World War began, Scott was brought up in a military family. His father, a senior officer in the Royal Engineers, was absent for most of his early life. His elder brother, Frank, joined the Merchant Navy when he was still young and the pair had little contact. During this time the family moved around; they lived in Cumberland as well as other areas of England, in addition to Wales and Germany, where Colonel Scott was part of the post-war Allied Control Council. After the war the Scott family moved back to County Durham and eventually settled on Teesside.

His interest in science fiction began by reading the novels of H. G. Wells as a child. He was also influenced by science-fiction films such as It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Them! He said these films "kind of got [him] going a little" but his attention was not fully caught until he saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, about which he said, "Once I saw that, I knew what I could do." He went to Grangefield Grammar School in Stockton on Tees and obtained a diploma in design at West Hartlepool College of Art. The industrial landscape in West Hartlepool would later inspire visuals in Blade Runner, with Scott stating, "There were steelworks adjacent to West Hartlepool, so every day I'd be going through them, and thinking they're kind of magnificent, beautiful, winter or summer, and the darker and more ominous it got, the more interesting it got."

I use everything I learned every day at art school. It's all about white sheets of paper, pens and drawing.