Spielberg, Steven (redirected from Steven Spielberg)

Spielberg, Steven, 1947–, American film director, b. Cincinnati, Ohio. Spielberg began his career as a television director, admired for his understanding portrayal of human character. His film Jaws (1975) was the first to earn more than $100 million, a record he surpassed first with E.T. (1983) and then with Jurassic Park (1993), which grossed more than $900 million. Spielberg's love of older movies was demonstrated with his serial-inspired trilogy of movies featuring Indiana Jones. Other films, many based on literary works, include The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), and the widely acclaimed Holocaust drama Schindler's List (1993), for which he won an Academy Award. In 1994, Spielberg, former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and recording industry mogul David Geffen formed Dreamworks SKG, a movie studio and entertainment company.

The director later explored a slave revolt and trial in Amistad (1997) and won his second Oscar for the realistic World War II drama Saving Private Ryan (1998). He subsequently examined a ghastly future world of neurotic humans and sentient robots (the result of a collaboration with Stanley Kubrick) in A.I. (2001), for which he also wrote the screenplay, and portrayed another dark future in which crime is detected and stopped before it is committed in the allegory-thriller Minority Report (2002). He turned to a lighter, more comic vision in his tales of a young imposter and his implacable pursuer in Catch Me If You Can (2002) and a foreigner stranded in New York's Kennedy Airport in The Terminal (2004). Munich (2005) is a tale of Israelis and Palestinians, and terrorism and vengeance. By the early 21st cent., Spielberg was Hollywood's most famous, influential, and successful mainstream director.

Bibliography

See biography by J. McBride (1997).

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Spielberg, Steven

(born Dec. 18, 1947, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.) U.S. film director and producer. He attracted the attention of Universal Pictures with a short film he made about the time of his graduation from California State College, Long Beach (1970). As a director of television movies, he made the thriller Duel (1971), and in 1974 he directed the feature film The Sugarland Express. His shark-attack thriller Jaws (1975) became one of the highest-grossing movies ever, and he went on to direct huge successes such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and E.T.—the Extraterrestrial (1982). He received Academy Awards for directing Schindler's List (1993), which tells the story of a group of Polish Jews who avoided Nazi extermination camps through the heroic actions of a German industrialist, and Saving Private Ryan (1998), which followed American soldiers in the days after the Normandy invasion of 1944. His other movies include The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), Jurassic Park (1993), A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), and Minority Report (2002). In 1994 he cofounded DreamWorks SKG, a film, animation, and television production company.

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Spielberg, Steven (1947–  ) film director; born in Cincinnati, Ohio. At age 13 he won a contest with a short feature, Escape to Nowhere. He turned to television directing in 1969, and in 1974 he turned out his first feature film, The Sugarland Express. He specialized in films of primeval fears or childlike wonder, such as Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and E.T. (1982). In 1993 he enjoyed spectacular success with Jurassic Park, one of the most popular movies of all time, and Schindler's List, his most respected serious film.