Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg was born December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Leah Adler, a restaurateur and concert pianist, and Arnold Spielberg, an electrical engineer. He grew up partly in Arizona and California, making amateur films as a teenager. His 1968 short Amblin’ led to a contract at Universal Television. He directed episodes of television series, including Marcus Welby, M.D. and Columbo, before making the television film Duel (1971), in which a traveling salesman is terrorized by an unseen truck driver. His theatrical feature debut, The Sugarland Express (1974), starred Goldie Hawn and drew attention for its car chases. Jaws (1975), adapted from Peter Benchley’s novel, made Spielberg a major director. Roy Scheider’s police chief, Richard Dreyfuss’s oceanographer, and Robert Shaw’s shark hunter pursue a great white off fictional Amity Island; the film became the first movie to earn more than $100 million at the U.S. box office. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) followed with a story of contact with extraterrestrials. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), created with George Lucas, introduced Harrison Ford’s archaeologist Indiana Jones. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), about Elliott and a stranded alien, became another box-office phenomenon and received nine Academy Award nominations. Spielberg later made The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Jurassic Park (1993), based on Michael Crichton’s novel, used pioneering computer-generated imagery to bring dinosaurs to the screen. In the same year, Spielberg released Schindler’s List, a black-and-white drama about German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Spielberg won another Best Director Oscar for Saving Private Ryan (1998), whose opening depicts the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach. His later directing credits include A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002), Catch Me If You Can (2002), Munich (2005), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015), The Post (2017), West Side Story (2021), and The Fabelmans (2022). The Fabelmans drew on his adolescence through Sammy Fabelman, a young filmmaker whose family life is shaped by his parents’ separation. In 1994, Spielberg cofounded DreamWorks SKG with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. As producer, he helped establish Amblin Entertainment and has backed films including Back to the Future and Men in Black. After Schindler’s List, he founded the Shoah Foundation, recording Holocaust and genocide testimonies worldwide.