Walter Donovan is the villainous American businessman seeking the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Donovan is a wealthy industrialist who approaches Indiana Jones after Indiana’s father, Henry Jones Sr., disappears while researching the Grail. Donovan presents himself as a patron of the expedition, but he is secretly working with the Nazis and wants the Grail for his own purposes.
Julian Glover played Donovan in the 1989 film. The character’s most famous scene comes at the Grail temple, where Donovan chooses the wrong cup and rapidly ages to death. The scene establishes that the Grail is not valuable merely as an ancient object: it grants life only under the film’s supernatural rules and cannot be safely identified by appearance alone.
Donovan is distinct from René Belloq, the French archaeologist who opposes Indiana in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He is also unrelated to Colonel Dietrich, another Nazi-linked figure from Raiders.