As a young man, Ralph Faulkner headed to Hollywood in the hopes of becoming a movie star and landed his first role in 1917. Although he appeared as an actor in less than ten credited film roles, he nevertheless left his legacy on Hollywood for nearly six and a half decades. In 1922 an accident while filming left him with a severe leg injury and, in the hopes of nursing it back to health and not forfeiting his fledgling career, he took up fencing. By 1928 he was the World Sabre Champion and had found a place on the United States Olympic fencing team, although he would not actually compete in the Games until the 1932 Summer Olympics, where he placed fourth in the team sabre event.
Almost immediately after his injury, however, he had begun working as a fight coordinator on numerous Hollywood productions and, by 1935, he had given up amateur competition in favour of working on films and occasionally taking up uncredited roles as fencers in the productions. By the time of his last production, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, he had been associated with dozens of films. He ran a fencing studio in Hollywood from the 1930s and worked there full time into his 90s. In 1949 the International Fencing Association presented him a scroll in honor of his achievements in the sport.