Steven Spielberg

A child of the Southwest and California, Steven Spielberg, like his friend George Lucas, faced rejection from film schools, only to go on to be one of the film industry’s top directors and producers. The son of a computer engineer father and a musician mother, Steven Spielberg was not the only creative one in the family—his sister Anne has also dabbled in film.

Born December 18, 1946, Steven Spielberg at a young age demonstrated an aptitude for filmmaking. A very early, amateur war film already showed the director making creative use of visual effects, with dirt clods simulating the impact of bullets on the ground surrounding the soldiers. This interest in combining imagination with visual technique continues to define his films, and according to Steven Spielberg represents a great challenge to filmmaking in the 21st century.

He was aggressively self-educated, making contact with everyone from behind the scenes studio technicians to Joan Crawford. In fact, he has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome—a condition somewhat similar to obsessive compulsive disorder, but which tends to be directed towards acquiring knowledge on a specific subject, rather than towards less productive neuroses.

He has created several iconic franchises, including Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, and, of course, Jaws. Working with George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic special effects company, Steven Spielberg has for much of his career distinguished himself with bar-raising visuals. Tempering his visual flair with strong musical scores, smooth-as-butter pacing, and attention to actors’ performances (he has directed nine actors to Academy Award nominations), Spielberg has received a great deal of critical acclaim on top of his box office success.

Spielberg’s father served in World War II, which may account for the frequent recurrence of the conflict in his films. As a socially conscious Jew, he is also compelled to illustrate the horrors of the Holocaust, and his more recent films return again and again to the horrors of totalitarianism and oppression. To date he has produced over 100 films and directed roughly half that number. Today his oeuvre remains a blend of blockbusters and emotionally charged political tales that rarely fail to pack theaters.