Mahmoud Ismail (1914–1983; Arabic: محمود إسماعيل) was an Egyptian actor of stage and film, a screenplay writer, and a film director. Ismail worked on more than 40 film projects, including acting in some twenty five films and six television series.^[1]

Ismail began his artistic career as a theater actor in the Egyptian National Theatre Troupe.^[1] He was a Sufi, and had lived in the Al-Hussein neighborhood of Cairo.^[2]

As an actor in film he frequently worked with film directors Ahmed Badrakhan, Niazi Mostafa, Hassan Hilmy [ar], and Hasan El-Saifi. He often played characters that had a criminal past or villians (such as thieves, thugs, and drug dealers).^[3][4] Ismail disappeared from the film scene for a few years, then returned again to appear on screen intermittently in films and television miniseries’s in the late-1970s and early-1980s.^[5] Ismail was also a prolific screenplay writer.