Charles Urban (April 15, 1867 – August 29, 1942) was a German-American film producer and distributor, and one of the most significant figures in British cinema before the First World War.

He changed his names to Charles after leaving school in 1882, then worked as a book agent across Ohio, before managing a stationery store in Detroit, Michigan.

He moved to Britain in August 1897, and became managing director of the Warwick Trading Company, where he specialised in actuality film, including newsfilm of the Anglo-Boer War.

[5] 'The Unseen World' went on to run for an unbroken nine months at the Alhambra and confirmed Urban's belief in the entertainment value of scientific and educational films.

Filmmakers who worked for him include Jack Avery, Joseph Rosenthal, Charles Rider Noble, Harold Mease Lomas, the mountaineer Frank Ormiston-Smith, George Rogers, J. Gregory Mantle and the naturalist F. Percy Smith.

Urban's future second wife, Ada Aline Jones (they married in 1910), purchased the patent rights from Smith and became a director of the company.

Of these the most prominent was the Kinemacolor Company of America, whose most notorious production was the unreleased The Clansman, a colour version of the Thomas Dixon story later filmed by D.W. Griffith as The Birth of a Nation.

Urban's British company produced Kinemacolor fiction films, with studios in Hove and Nice, including By Order of Napoleon (1910), the western Fate (1911), Santa Claus (1912) and the feature-length The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1914).

Along with his associate Henry W. Joy, Urban continued his research in colour cinematography and developed an improved version of Kinemacolor, called Kinekrom, shown to the public in November 1916 in New York.

He produced the documentary feature Britain Prepared (1915) for Wellington House, which included Kinemacolor sequences of the British fleet at Scapa Flow.

[8] Another company, Official Government Pictures, achieved better distribution by use of more sensationalist advertising, but Urban's task became much easier once America entered the war in April 1917.