Steven Spielberg

Steven Allan Spielberg (; born December 18, 1946) is an American filmmaker. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, Spielberg is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema and is the highest-grossing film director of all time. Among other accolades, he has received three Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, four BAFTA Awards, twelve Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, and a Grammy Award, as well as the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1995, an honorary knighthood in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2006, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2009, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and the National Medal of Arts in 2023. According to Forbes, he is the wealthiest celebrity. He is one of 22 people to achieve EGOT status.

Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. He moved to California and studied film in college. After directing several episodes for television, including Night Gallery and Columbo, he directed the television film Duel (1971), which was approved by Barry Diller. He made his theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), also beginning his decades-long collaboration with composer John Williams, with whom he has worked with for all but five of his theatrical releases. He became a household name with the summer blockbuster Jaws (1975), and continuously directed more acclaimed escapist box-office blockbusters with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the original Indiana Jones trilogy (1981–1989). He also explored drama in The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987).

In 1993, Spielberg directed back-to-back hits with the science fiction film Jurassic Park, the highest-grossing film ever at the time, and the epic historical drama Schindler's List, which has often been listed as one of the greatest films ever made. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for the latter as well as for the World War II epic Saving Private Ryan (1998). Spielberg has since directed the science fiction films A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds (2005) and Ready Player One (2018); the historical dramas Amistad (1997), Munich (2005), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017); the comedies Catch Me If You Can (2002) and The Terminal (2004); the animated film The Adventures of Tintin (2011); the musical West Side Story (2021); and the family drama The Fabelmans (2022).

Spielberg co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks Pictures, and he has served as a producer for many successful films and television series, among them Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), An American Tail (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Animaniacs (1993), Freakazoid! (1995), Twister (1996), Band of Brothers (2001) and Transformers (2007–present). Several of Spielberg's works are considered among the greatest films in history, and some are among the highest-grossing films ever. Seven of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". In 2013, Time listed him as one of the 100 most influential people, and in 2023, Spielberg was the recipient of the first ever Time 100 Impact Award in the US.

Early life, education, and early career

Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest child and only son of four children. His mother, Leah Adler (née Posner), was a concert pianist and ran a kosher dairy restaurant, and his father, Arnold, was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers. His immediate family were Reform Jewish/Orthodox Jewish. Spielberg's paternal grandparents were Jews from Ukraine; his grandmother Rebecca (née Chechik), was from Sudylkiv, and his grandfather Shmuel Spielberg was from Kamianets-Podilskyi. Spielberg has three younger sisters: Anne, Sue, and Nancy. At their home in Cincinnati, his grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors. They, in turn, taught him numbers:

One man in particular, I kept looking at his numbers–his number tattooed on his forearm ... he started – you know, when–during the dinner break, when everybody was eating and not learning, he would point to the numbers. And he would say, that is a two, and that is a four. And then he'd say, and this is a eight, and that's a one. And I'll never forget this. And he said, and that's a nine. And then he crooked his arm and inverted his arm and said, and see, it becomes a six. It's magic. And now it's a nine, and now it's a six, and now it's a nine and now it's a six. And that's really how I learned my numbers for the first time ... the irony of all that, and the gift of that lesson, never really dawned on me until I was much older.

In 1952, his family moved to Haddon Township, New Jersey, after his father was hired by RCA. Spielberg attended Hebrew school from 1953 to 1957, in classes taught by Rabbi Albert L. Lewis. In early 1957, the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Spielberg had a bar mitzvah ceremony when he was thirteen. His family was involved in the synagogue and had many Jewish friends. Of the Holocaust, he said that his parents "talked about it all the time, and so it was always on my mind". His father had lost between sixteen and twenty relatives in the Holocaust. Spielberg found it difficult accepting his heritage; he said: "It isn't something I enjoy admitting ... but when I was seven, eight, nine years old, God forgive me, I was embarrassed because we were Orthodox Jews. I was embarrassed by the outward perception of my parents' Jewish practices. I was never really ashamed to be Jewish, but I was uneasy at times." Spielberg was the target of antisemitism: "In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible." He gradually followed Judaism less during adolescence, after his family had moved to various neighborhoods and found themselves to be the only Jews.

Spielberg recalls his parents taking him to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). He had never seen a movie before, and thought they were taking him to the circus. He was terrified by the movie's train crash, and at age 12, he recreated it with his Lionel trains and filmed it. He recalls: "The trains went around and around, and after a while that got boring, and I had this eight-millimeter camera, and I staged a train wreck and filmed it. That was hard on the trains, but then I could cut the film lots of different ways and look at it over and over again." This was his first home movie. In 1958, he became a Boy Scout, eventually attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. He fulfilled a requirement for the photography merit badge by making a nine-minute 8 mm Western, The Last Gunfight. Spielberg used his father's movie camera to make amateur features, and began taking the camera along on every Scout trip. At age 13, Spielberg made a 40-minute war film, Escape to Nowhere, with a cast of classmates. The film won first prize in a statewide competition. Throughout his early teens, and after entering high school, Spielberg made about fifteen to twenty 8 mm adventure films. He recalls that

my dad told me stories about World War II constantly ... I knew, based on the stories my dad and his friends were telling about World War II, that there was no glory in war. And it was ugly, and it was cruel ... it was, you know, visually devastating. And so I thought, someday, if I ever do make a war movie for real, it's got to be something that tells the truth about what those experiences had been for those young 17-, 18-, 19-year-old boys storming Omaha Beach, let's say.

In Phoenix, Spielberg went to the local theater every Saturday. Formative films included Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous (1937), Walt Disney's Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and The Seven Samurai (1954), Ishirō Honda's Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) ("the film that set me on my journey"), Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) ("I'm still living off the adrenalin that ... I experienced watching that film for the first time.") He attended Arcadia High School in 1961 for three years. In 1963, he wrote and directed a 140-minute science fiction film, Firelight, the basis of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Firelight, funded mainly by his father, was shown in a local theater for one evening and grossed $501 against its $500 budget.