David Wark Griffith — known throughout his career simply as D.W. Griffith, and christened with the fuller name David Llewelyn Wark Griffith — was one of the most influential directors of early American cinema. He was born on 22 January 1875 in La Grange, Kentucky, USA, the son of Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate army colonel and Kentucky state legislator. Griffith died on 23 July 1948 in Hollywood, California.
Griffith directed several hundred films during the silent era, many of them short one- and two-reel pictures made for the Biograph Company before he moved into feature-length production. His best-known works include The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916) and Broken Blossoms (1919). He is widely credited with helping to establish techniques that became standard tools of narrative filmmaking, including parallel editing, the flashback and the close-up. In 1919 he co-founded the distribution company United Artists together with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
The Birth of a Nation remains historically significant for its technical innovation, but it is also rightly remembered as a deeply controversial film: it presents a racist and inaccurate portrayal of the Reconstruction era and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. The film was condemned on its release by the NAACP and by many contemporary critics, and it continues to be studied both for its filmmaking techniques and for the harm caused by its content.
Griffith was not born in Wales, and no documented record connects his immediate family to a Welsh birthplace. His link to Wales rests on family tradition rather than genealogy: Griffith himself said he had grown up hearing that one branch of his family descended from "ap Griffith, a Welsh Prince of Wales" — a story he described as an inherited tale rather than a proven fact. His own middle name, Llewelyn, reflects that family tradition of Welsh heritage, even though the precise line of descent has never been verified.