Roger William Corman (April 5, 1926 – May 9, 2024) was an American film director, producer, and actor. Known under various monikers such as "The Pope of Pop Cinema", "The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood", and "The King of Cult", he was known as a trailblazer in the world of independent film.

Many of the more than 500 features directed or produced by Corman were low-budget films that later attracted a cult following, such as A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), The Intruder (1962), X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963), and the counterculture films The Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip (1967). House of Usher (1960) became the first of eight films directed by Corman that were adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and which collectively came to be known as the "Poe Cycle".

In 1964, Corman became the youngest filmmaker to have a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, as well as in the British Film Institute and the Museum of Modern Art. He was the co-founder of New World Pictures, the founder of New Concorde and was a longtime member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2009, he was awarded an Academy Honorary Award "for his rich engendering of films and filmmakers".

Corman was also famous for handling the American distribution of many films by noted foreign directors, including Federico Fellini (Italy), Ingmar Bergman (Sweden), François Truffaut (France) and Akira Kurosawa (Japan). He mentored and gave a start to many young film directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, John Sayles, and James Cameron, and was highly influential in the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He also helped to launch the careers of actors including Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, and William Shatner.

Corman occasionally acted in films by directors who started with him, including The Godfather Part II (1974), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Philadelphia (1993), Apollo 13 (1995), and The Manchurian Candidate (2004). A documentary about Corman's life and career titled Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, directed by Alex Stapleton, premiered at the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals in 2011. The film's TV rights were picked up by A&E IndieFilms after a well-received screening at Sundance.

Corman was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Anne (née High) and William Corman, a civil engineer, of Russian Jewish descent. His younger brother, Gene, produced numerous films, sometimes in collaboration with Roger. Corman was raised in his mother's Catholic faith.

Corman went to Beverly Hills High School and then to Stanford University to study industrial engineering. While at Stanford, Corman realized he did not want to be an engineer. He enlisted in the V-12 Navy College Training Program when he still had six months of study to complete. After serving in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Stanford to finish his degree, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering in 1947. While at Stanford University, Corman was initiated in the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

In 1948, he worked briefly at U.S. Electrical Motors on Slauson Avenue in Los Angeles, but his career in engineering lasted only four days; he began work on Monday and quit on Thursday, telling his boss "I've made a terrible mistake." Soon after that he found work at 20th Century Fox as a messenger in the mailroom, earning $32.50 per week, following his brother, who worked in the mailroom, at MCA Inc..