He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1920, taking first-class honors in classics, history and political science. After winning first prize for violin at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in 1913, his father, wanting a more traditional career for his son, turned down an opportunity for Walter to audition for Sir Henry Wood, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. His violin teacher was the celebrated Italian virtuoso and composer, Achille Simonetti, a master who had been taught by Camillo Sivori, the only pupil of Niccolo Paganini. He became the first Professor of Spanish at Trinity College in 1926; his position covered both Spanish and Italian (there was an earlier "Professorship of Modern Languages" created in 1776 also covering both Italian and Spanish Welcome - Department of Hispanic Studies - Trinity College Dublin ). One of his pupils at Trinity was Samuel Beckett who, however later took as his mentor, Thomas Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Modern Languages (French), described as "equally colourful" and probably more compatible.

As Starkie suffered with chronic asthma throughout his life, he was sent to the warmer climate of Italy during World War I where he joined the Y.M.C.A. providing entertainment for the British troops. After the armistice in November, 1918, in the town of Montebello Vicentino, he befriended five Hungarian Gypsy prisoners of war and aided them in acquiring wood to construct makeshift fiddles. To one of them, Farkas, he became a bloodbrother and he swore that he would someday visit Farkas in Hungary and mix with the Gypsy's tribe. This oath would later haunt him and affect the course of his life. While on tour in Northern Italy he met Italia Augusta Porchietti, an Italian Red Cross nurse who was singing to patients and wounded soldiers at a hospital ward in Genoa. They were married on August 13, 1921 and had a son, Landi William, and a daughter, Alma Delfina.

After the publication of his book on Luigi Pirandello, Starkie became a director of the Abbey Theatre in 1927 at the invitation of W.B. Yeats. Recent productions had been fraught with controversy, and one of his roles was to act as arbitor among the factions. Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson were the other two board members. At the start of World War II the British were eager to send Catholics down to Spain as their representatives, and so the Irish-Catholic, fiddle-playing Starkie was sent to Madrid as the British Council representative, which took him away from the theatre and nightlife of Dublin, and into World War II Spain. He resigned from the Abbey Theatre on September 17, 1942.

He was one of the founders of the Centre International des Études Fascistes (CINEF). Its only publication, A Survey of Fascism (1928), had an article by him, Whither is Ireland Heading - Is It Fascism? Thoughts on the Irish Free State? During the 1930s he was an apologist for Mussolini, whom he had interviewed in 1927.

In general terms he was influenced by the Hungarian Odon Por, Machiavelli, and by the Irish poet and mystic George William Russell (AE) in his writing on co-operatives. He travelled to Abyssinia in 1935 and later wrote in favour of the Italian campaign there, opposing Eamon de Valera's call for sanctions, fearing they would further isolate Italy and drive Benito Mussolini into an alliance with Adolf Hitler.

He was the founder and first director of the British Institute in Madrid (1940-1954), and opened branches in Barcelona, Bilbao, Seville and Valencia. The Institute was backed by the British Council and through lectures and exhibitions worked to influence Spanish opinion during World War II and help maintain Spanish neutrality. Upon accepting this position he made a promise to Lord George Lloyd not to write any new books and to put the Raggle-Taggle Gypsies to rest for the duration of the war. However, Spain, owing to her non-belligerent status, became an asylum for refugees from all over Europe, so his promise to curtail hobnobbing with Gypsies became impractical. The Institute stood apart from the British Embassy which, like most embassies, tended to be stand-offish toward their local nationals. It was itself an embassy to the survivors of Spain's intellectual eclipse following the Spanish Civil War. On any one evening one could count on finding there a great novelist such as Pío Baroja, a rising star like Camilo José Cela (Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1989), that prince of essayists, Azorín, and composers like Joaquín Rodrigo. He left behind him a thriving institute which now has a school of more than 1,000 students. During the war he also helped organize and operate an escape route across the Pyrenees for British airmen shot down over France. Walter and Augusta also allowed their large flat at number 24 Calle del Prado to be used as a safe house for escaping prisoners of war and Jewish refugees.

He was professor of comparative literature at the University of Madrid, from 1947 to 1956. After he retired from the British Institute he accepted a university position in the United States. It was his third American tour, taking him to the University of Texas, Austin (1957-58), New York University (1959), Kansas University (1960), Colorado University (1961), and finally to the University of California, Los Angeles (1961-70) where as Professor-in-Residence he was assigned to lecture in six Departments (English, Folklore-Mythology, Italian, Music, Spanish-Portuguese, and Theatre).

After his retirement from U.C.L.A. he returned with his wife, Italia Augusta, to live in Madrid. After suffering from a severe cardiac asthma attack he died on November 2, 1976. Italia followed him six months later on May 10, 1977. They are buried in the British Institute Cemetery in Madrid.

The academic Enid Starkie was his sister.

He won fame for his travels and was profiled by Time Magazine as a modern-day 'gypsy'. He published accounts of his experiences as a university vacation vagabond following the trail of the Gypsies in Raggle Taggle, subtitled "Adventures with a fiddle in Hungary and Roumania" and sequels, Spanish Raggle Taggle and Don Gypsy which are picaresque accounts in the tradition of George Borrow, with frontispieces by Arthur Rackham. His observations of Gypsy life, while more anecdotal than scholarly, provide rich insights into these shadowy, nomadic people. Just as important Starkie's life serves as an example. As Julian Moynahan said in reviewing Scholars and Gypsies for The New York Times Book Review (November 24, 1963): "Many lives have been more interesting and enviable in the telling than the living, but not so here. Emerging from the shadow of a somewhat blighted inheritance, Walter Starkie chose and enjoyed a lifelong freedom which most of us throw away with both hands on the day we leave school and take our first jobs." He was the President of the Gypsy Lore Society from 1962 to 1973.

In addition to publishing a 1964 translation of plays from the Spanish Golden Age in the Modern Library volume as Eight Spanish Plays of the Golden Age, he published an unabridged translation of Don Quixote for Macmillan Publishers in 1957. It was reprinted in paperback in 1964 by New American Library. . Starkie also published an abridged translation of the work, also printed by New American Library. Written in contemporary English, both have been in print since their publications, and are considered highly accurate, but Starkie does occasionally put Irish slang and phrase construction (e.g. the phrase "I'm thinking", instead of "I think", and the oath "Bad 'cess to you!") into the mouths of its peasant characters. This is a trait he repeats in a translation of a brief one-acter by Lope de Rueda published in Eight Spanish Plays of the Golden Age.

Walter Starkie