Thomas Frank Mankiewicz (June 1, 1942 – July 31, 2010) was an American screenwriter, director, and producer of motion pictures and television whose credits included James Bond films and his contributions to Superman (1978) and the television series Hart to Hart. He was the son of Joseph Mankiewicz and nephew of Herman Mankiewicz. He is not related to the similarly named Wolf Mankowitz who worked on the first James Bond film, uncredited.

Mankiewicz was born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1942. His parents were Austrian-born actress Rose Stradner and the celebrated screenwriter/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, son of German-Jewish immigrants. In 1950, his father, after winning four Oscars in two years for the screenplays and direction of A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, decided to move his family back to New York City, where he had been raised.

Mankiewicz was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy (1955–1959) and Yale College (1959–1963). He majored in drama at Yale, completing the first two years of the Yale Drama School while still an undergraduate. His mother committed suicide in 1958, when Mankiewicz was 16 years old.

During vacations he worked at the Williamstown Summer Theater in Massachusetts both in production and as an actor. In 1961, he was hired as a third assistant director on The Comancheros, a film starring John Wayne and Lee Marvin, which was shot in the Monument Valley of Utah, the last film directed by Michael Curtiz. Wayne told Mankiewicz to remove his John F. Kennedy button.

In 1963, two young producers, Stuart Millar and Lawrence Turman, took Mankiewicz on as their assistant while making The Best Man, the 1964 film version of Gore Vidal's Broadway play starring Henry Fonda. He was involved in virtually every aspect of the film, receiving his first on-screen credit as "Production Associate."

Mankiewicz began to write, finishing an original screenplay, Please, about the last ninety minutes in the life of a suicidal young actress. It was optioned at times by three different studios, never made, but served as an example of his talent and was responsible for his first writing assignment, an episode of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, directed by Stuart Rosenberg. He received a credit as "Thomas F. Mankiewicz", but thought it looked so pretentious on the screen he became Tom Mankiewicz for the rest of his career.

Mankiewicz later recalled:

There was something terribly frightening about writing a screenplay when you have the last name of Mankiewicz. You say to yourself, 'Oh, sh*t, no matter what I write, it sure ain't any All About Eve, is it?' It takes a long time to get over that. When I first came out here, everybody said, 'Give my regards to your old man, will you, and by the way, if there's anything I can do for you ___ ' On the one hand, all of that is very nice and tremendously advantageous. On the other hand, it sort of robs you of any sense of achievement. It's a real double-edged sword. And it wasn't until I had been asked back several times and, as awful as it sounds, for a lot of money, that I could finally convince myself that these people really want me because they think that I'm the best person to write the script.