Samuel Alexander "Sam" Mendes CBE (born 1 August 1965) is an English stage, film and commercial director at RSA US. He is known for his 1998 production of Cabaret, starring Alan Cumming, and his debut film, American Beauty, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director.

Mendes was born in Reading, Berkshire, England to Jameson Peter Mendes, a university professor, and Valerie Helene Barnett, an author of children's books. His father is from Trinidad's ethnic Portuguese community, and his mother an English Jew. His grandfather is the Trinidad writer Alfred Mendes. He attended Magdalen College School in Oxford and graduated from Peterhouse, the oldest college of the University of Cambridge, with a B.A. in 1987.

Mendes first attracted attention for his production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in the West End which starred Judi Dench before he was twenty-five years old. Soon he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company where his productions, many of them featuring Simon Russell Beale, included Troilus and Cressida, Richard III and The Tempest.