Steven Spielberg

Steven Allan Spielberg is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the founding pioneers of the New Hollywood era. His films include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park. He has won the Academy Award for Best Director twice. His total work makes him the highest-grossing film director in history. His net worth is estimated to be more than USD 3 billion.

About Steven Spielberg in brief

Summary Steven SpielbergSteven Allan Spielberg is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the founding pioneers of the New Hollywood era. He became a household name as the director of Jaws, which is considered the first summer blockbuster. His films include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park. Spielberg is also known for his long time collaboration with acclaimed composer John Williams. He has won the Academy Award for Best Director twice. His total work makes him the highest-grossing film director in history. His net worth is estimated to be more than USD 3 billion. He co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks Pictures, where he has also served as a producer or executive producer for several successful film trilogies, tetralogies and more including the Gremlins, Back to the Future, Men in Black, and the Transformers series. Spielberg attended Hebrew school from 1953 to 1957, in classes taught by Rabbi Albert L. Lewis. As a child, Spielberg faced difficulty reconciling being an Orthodox Jew with the perception of him by other children he played with. He also said he suffered from acts of anti-Semitic prejudice and bullying: “In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible.’’ His paternal grandparents were Jews from Ukraine who settled in Cincinnati in the 1900s; his grandmother was from Sudylkiv, while his grandfather was from Kamianets-Podilskyi.

At age 12, he made his first home movie: a train wreck involving his toy Lionel trains. In 1958, he became a Boy Scout and fulfilled a requirement for the photography merit badge by making a nine-minute, 8 mm film entitled The Last Gunfight. At 13, while living in Phoenix, he won a prize for a 40-minute war film titled Escape to Now. He made 15 more amateur, 8mm films : 548: 548. Some of the early influences that he grew up watching include the film King of the Monsters, which he called the most masterful of the dinosaur titles as well as Captains of Arabia and Lawrence of Arabia. His father, Arnold Spielberg, was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers. His mother, Leah, was a restaurateur and concert pianist, and his father was an Electrical Engineer. His family was Orthodox Jewish and lived in Haddon Township, New Jersey, when his father took a job with RCA. He later transitioned into producing several video games, and later moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where his family moved to. He has worked on all but five of his feature films, and on whose films Williams has won 3 of his 5 Academy Awards for Best Original Score. Some of his films are also among thehighest- grossing of all time, while some of his total work make him the most successful film director.