Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian-born British writer of romance and adventure novels.

It took Sabatini roughly a quarter of a century of hard work before he attained success in 1921 with Scaramouche.

He only published three more books before his death in 1950: King in Prussia (also known as The Birth of Mischief, 1944), Turbulent Tales (a collection of shorts, 1946), and The Gamester (1949).

They suffered further tragedy when Christine's son, Lancelot Steele Dixon, was killed in a flying accident on the day he received his RAF wings in 1940;[3] he flew his aeroplane over his family's house, but the plane went out of control and crashed in flames right before the observers' eyes.

On his headstone his wife had written, "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad", the first line of Scaramouche.

His novel Bardelys the Magnificent was made into a famous 1926 "lost" film of the same title, directed by King Vidor, starring John Gilbert, and long viewable only in a fragment excerpted in Vidor's silent comedy Show People (1928).

A silent version of Captain Blood (1924), directed by David Smith and starring J. Warren Kerrigan, which was one of the last productions of the Vitagraph Company of America, survives in the Library of Congress, and two other silent adaptations of Sabatini novels which survive in other archives are Rex Ingram's Scaramouche (1923) starring Ramón Novarro at the George Eastman Museum, and Frank Lloyd's The Sea Hawk starring Milton Sills at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.