Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg was born into a post-war American Jewish family; his father was a computer-pioneer electrical engineer and his mother a former pianist. His childhood moved with his father’s work through New Jersey, Arizona, and elsewhere, and as a minority he often felt out of place, pouring his loneliness and imagination into the camera. At around eleven or twelve he was already filming family trips on an 8mm camera, and as a teenager he even completed a science-fiction film over two hours long — dreaming was, from the very start, his way of fighting reality.

With mediocre grades he failed to get into the film school he wanted, took a detour through an ordinary California university, then left midway to break straight into the industry. A short film, "Amblin’," won him a contract with Universal, letting the young man direct episodes in its television division. What truly made his name was the TV movie "Duel" — from the simple premise of a mysterious tanker truck hunting a driver, he orchestrated suffocating suspense, revealing an innate command of rhythm and fear.

In his twenties, "Jaws" burst onto the scene. This shark thriller not only broke box-office records but almost single-handedly launched the age of the summer blockbuster. "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" followed to acclaim, turning his curiosity about the cosmos, his longing for childhood, and his fascination with wonder into shared screen memories for generations. He proved that commerce and imagination could go hand in hand, and redefined the boundaries of what popular cinema could be.

Yet he was not content to be only a master of dream-spinning entertainment. From "The Color Purple" and "Empire of the Sun" he kept reaching toward serious subjects, until 1993 brought a fateful year: "Jurassic Park" resurrected dinosaurs with breakthrough effects and broke box-office records, while the black-and-white "Schindler’s List" re-created the Holocaust with grave restraint, winning him his first Academy Award for Best Director. Deeply moved by that history, he founded a foundation to systematically record survivors’ oral testimony.

He went on to co-found DreamWorks, won another Oscar for the extreme realism of the Normandy landing in "Saving Private Ryan," and moved freely among science fiction, history, and biography with "Lincoln," "Bridge of Spies," and "West Side Story," one after another. Approaching eighty, he looked back tenderly in the semi-autobiographical "The Fabelmans" at the boy who understood the world through a camera. Today Spielberg is both a maker of box-office legend and a conscience of contemporary film art — he gave entertainment weight, and history warmth.