Steven Spielberg

In the Cincinnati house his grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors, and one of them taught the boy his numbers off the tattoo on his forearm, turning the arm so the nine became a six and back again. He said the irony did not reach him for decades. His father's engineering jobs moved them to New Jersey, then Phoenix, then Saratoga, and by high school he was being beaten for being Jewish: two bloody noses, kicked around. At 12 he restaged the train crash from The Greatest Show on Earth with Lionel trains and an 8 mm camera. At 17 he put a science fiction feature called Firelight into a Phoenix theater for one night. It took 501 dollars against a 500-dollar budget.

USC rejected him for mediocre grades. He went to Cal State Long Beach, talked his way onto the Universal lot, and in 1968 made a 26-minute short called Amblin' that got him a seven-year studio contract at 21, the youngest director signed long-term by a major studio. Jaws followed in 1975, the first feature shot on open ocean: the schedule ran 100 days over, the mechanical shark kept failing, and the failures forced him to suggest the thing instead of showing it. Then Close Encounters, Raiders, E.T., and in one year, 1993, Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, the first the highest-grossing film ever made to that point and the second winning him Best Picture and Best Director. Saving Private Ryan won him the directing award again in 1999. Seven of his films are in the National Film Registry.

The charge against him has been the same one for 40 years. Peter Biskind wrote that he infantilizes the audience, remaking the viewer as a child and then burying irony and reflection under sound and spectacle. When he answered by making Schindler's List, refusing a salary and putting his percentage into an archive of survivor testimony, the attack sharpened rather than eased. Jean-Luc Godard accused him of profiting from a tragedy. Claude Lanzmann, who had made Shoah, said the film misrepresented what it depicted. Imre Kertész, who had survived the camps, called kitsch any Holocaust film unwilling to see how our own deformed way of living made the camps possible. Roger Ebert asked what Godard had ever done for the survivors.

The verdict is not in, and he keeps moving. Empire ranked him the greatest director of all time in 2005, Life had called him the most influential person of his generation, and Forbes put him at 5.3 billion dollars in December 2024. Then West Side Story and The Fabelmans both lost money, which Variety read as a judgment on prestige films and on him. French critics went the other way: Cahiers du Cinema called The Fabelmans the most important and singular film of his career, and it became the highest-rated film of the century in France. In June 2026, at 79, he released a picture about UFOs called Disclosure Day.

Steven Spielberg's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Jaws film
  The first feature shot on open ocean. The broken shark made the picture. 1975
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial film
  Took the all-time box office record, as Jaws had and Jurassic Park would 1982
• Jurassic Park film
  Took the all-time box office record the same year as Schindler's List 1993
• Schindler's List film
  He took no salary. The profits founded the Shoah Foundation. 1993
• Saving Private Ryan film
  The second Academy Award for direction 1998
• The Fabelmans film
  His own Arizona childhood, written with Tony Kushner 2022

• 1958 aged ~12 Joins the Boy Scouts and makes Eagle at 13 The photography merit badge cost him a nine-minute 8 mm Western.
• 1964 aged ~18 Firelight plays one night in a Phoenix theater and grosses 501 dollars It cost 500, most of it his father's.
• 1968 aged ~22 Amblin' earns him a seven-year contract with Universal at 21 He was the youngest director ever signed long-term by a major studio.
• 1975 aged ~29 Jaws opens after a shoot that ran 100 days long Universal had threatened to shut the production down.
• 1985 aged ~39 The Color Purple draws 11 Academy Award nominations The Academy passed him over for direction. The Directors Guild did not.
• 1993 aged ~47 Releases Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in the same year The second brought him Best Picture and Best Director.
• 1994 aged ~48 Founds the Shoah Foundation to record survivor testimony
• February 2008 aged 61 Resigns as an adviser to the Beijing Olympics over Darfur Chinese state media called the objection unfair.
• June 12, 2026 aged 79 Releases Disclosure Day at 79

• George Lucas b. 1944
  Filmmaker who created Star Wars and Indiana Jones, later selling Lucasfilm to Disney for over $4 billion. collaborator and rival
• Stanley Kubrick 1928–1999
  Director whose technically ambitious films redefined science fiction, war, horror, and cinematic authorship. inherited the project A.I. from
• John Ford 1894–1973
  Director of Westerns and Depression dramas who won four directing Academy Awards. advised by
• Walt Disney 1901–1966
  Animator and business magnate who created Mickey Mouse and built the world's largest entertainment empire. measured against
• Tom Hanks b. 1956
  Academy Award-winning actor known for his everyman roles and status as one of Hollywood's most beloved stars. leading man
• Oprah Winfrey b. 1954
  Media executive and talk show host who built a multimedia empire and became one of the most influential women in the world. cast her in The Color Purple