Liev Schreiber

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Liev Schreiber

Born October 4, 1967 (age 39)
Flag of United States San Francisco, California, USA

Liev Schreiber (pronounced Lee-ev) (born Isaac Liev Schreiber on October 4, 1967) is a Tony Award-winning American actor, referred to by the New York Times as "the finest American theater actor of his generation."[1] He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s, having initially appeared in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the Scream series.

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[edit] Early life

Schreiber was born in San Francisco, California to Tell Schreiber, a stage actor and director, and Heather Milgram. Schreiber is Jewish on his mother's side.[2] His mother claims that she named him after her favorite author, Leo Tolstoy, while his father claims that Schreiber was named after the doctor who saved his mother's life. His family nickname, adopted when Schreiber was a baby, is "Huggy."[3] When Schreiber was one year old, his family moved to Canada, but at age four, due to his parents' divorce, he and his siblings moved to New York City with his mother, where he grew up.

His mother was "a highly cultured eccentric" who supported them by splitting her time between driving a cab and creating papier-mâché puppets."[3] On Schreiber's sixteenth birthday, his mother bought him a motorcycle, "to promote fearlessness."[3] The critic John Lahr wrote in a 1999 New Yorker profile that, "To a large extent, Schreiber’s professional shape-shifting and his uncanny instinct for isolating the frightened, frail, goofy parts of his characters are a result of being forced to adapt to his mother’s eccentricities. It’s both his grief and his gift.”[3] Schreiber's mother also forbade Schreiber from seeing color movies. As a result, his favorite actor was Charlie Chaplin. In the late seventies and early eighties Schreiber, known then as Shiva Das, lived at the Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville East, in Pomfret, CT. Subsequently, Schreiber attended Friends Seminary, the same school attended by actress Amanda Peet. When he was a senior, she was in sixth grade.

Schreiber went on to Brooklyn Technical High School and then to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where he began his acting training there and, via the Five Colleges consortium, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 1992, where he starred in Charles Evered's The Size of the World, directed by Walton Jones. He also attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He originally wanted to be a screenwriter, but was steered toward acting instead.

[edit] Career

[edit] Early films

Schreiber had several supporting roles in various independent films until his big break, as the accused murderer Cotton Weary in the horror film Scream. Schreiber had no lines in the first film, but would go on to play a bigger role in its sequels, Scream 2 and Scream 3. Though the success of the Scream series would lead Schreiber to roles in several big-budget studio pictures, Entertainment Weekly wrote in 2007 that "Schreiber is [still] best known for such indie gems as Walking and Talking, The Daytrippers, and Big Night."[4]

Liev Schreiber as Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candiate
Liev Schreiber as Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candiate

After Scream, Schreiber portrayed the young Orson Welles in the HBO original movie RKO 281, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award. He appeared as Laertes in the 2000 movie version of Hamlet. Then, he played supporting roles in several studio films, including The Hurricane with Denzel Washington, and The Sum of All Fears with Ben Affleck. The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Washington and Meryl Streep, was another major film for the actor, stirring some controversy as it opened during a heated presidential election cycle.

[edit] Shakespeare

Along with his screen work, Schreiber is a well-respected classical actor; in a 1998 review of the little-performed Shakespeare play Cymbeline, The New York Times called his performance "revelatory" and ended the article with the plea, "More Shakespeare, Mr. Schreiber."[5]. A year later, Schreiber played the title role in Hamlet in a December 1999 revival at the Public Theatre, to similar raves.

Liev Schreiber as Henry V
Liev Schreiber as Henry V

His Henry V in a 2004 Central Park production of that play caused Lahr to expound upon his aptitude at playing Shakespeare. "He has a swiftness of mind," Lahr wrote, "which convinces the audience that language is being coined in the moment. His speech, unlike that of the merely adequate supporting cast, feels lived rather than learned." [6]

In the spring of 2005, Schreiber essayed a non-Shakespearean stage role, that of Richard Roma in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross. As Roma, Schreiber won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play. In June to July 2006, he played the title role in Macbeth opposite Jennifer Ehle at the Delacorte Theater.

[edit] Forays into Directing and Recent Work

Schreiber told The New Yorker in 1999 that "I don’t know that I want to be an actor for the rest of my life." For a time in the late nineties, he hoped to produce and direct an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice starring Dustin Hoffman. [3] Around that time, Schreiber also started writing a screenplay about his relationship with his Ukrainian grandfather, a project he abandoned when, according to The New York Times, "he read Jonathan Safran Foer's hit novel, Everything Is Illuminated, and decided Mr. Foer had done it better."[7] Schreiber's film adaptation of the novel, which he both wrote and directed, was released in 2005. Starring Elijah Wood, the film received lukewarm-to-positive reviews,[8] with Roger Ebert calling it "a film that grows in reflection."

In fall 2006 Schreiber directed and starred in the "2006 Join the Fight" AIDS PSA campaign for Cable Positive and Kismet Films (others involved with the campaign included actress Naomi Watts, fashion designer Calvin Klein, and playwright Tony Kushner).

Liev Schreiber as Charlie Townsend
Liev Schreiber as Charlie Townsend

Schreiber's most recent movie role was that of Charlie Townsend in the 2006 film The Painted Veil, starring opposite Watts and Edward Norton.The actor played a character who temporarily replaces Gil Grissom, played by William Petersen, in the CBS show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation during the 2006-2007 season.[9] Liev played Michael Keppler, a seasoned CSI with a strong reputation in various police departments across the nation, before joining the veteran Las Vegas team. Schreiber joined the cast on January 18, 2007 and shot a four-episode arc on the show.[4]

The actor is currently performing in the Broadway premiere of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio. The show began previews at the Longacre Theatre on February 15th, 2007 in preparation for a March 11th opening. Schreiber will also play the womanizing Lotario Thurgot in Mike Newell's screen adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera, to be released in 2007. In a January 2007 interview, Schreiber mentioned that he was working on a screenplay.[4]

Schreiber has done narration work in a number of documentaries, many of them aired as part of PBS series such as American Experience, Nova, and Secrets of the Dead. Schreiber is also the voice of the HBO Sports documentaries under the Sports of the 20th Century heading. Schreiber is also the voice behind the television commercials for Infiniti motor vehicles.

[edit] Personal life

Schreiber has four half brothers and a half sister. One of his brothers, Pablo, is also an actor. Schreiber owns a Jack Russell terrier named Chicken. He enjoys basketball, fencing, cycling, and has played football in the past. Schreiber is currently in a relationship with Australian actress Naomi Watts (with whom he appeared in The Painted Veil). They are currently expecting their first child. [10]

Liev Schreiber with his girlfriend, Naomi Watts
Liev Schreiber with his girlfriend, Naomi Watts

[edit] Filmography

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ http://theater2.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/theater/reviews/12talk.html
  2. ^ http://www.lievschreiber.org/1999b.shtml
  3. ^ a b c d e Lahr, John. “Fresh Prince: Why Liev Schreiber is Ready to Play Hamlet,” The New Yorker 13 Dec. 1999. 46-52.
  4. ^ a b c Spotlight: Liev Among the Dead. by Lynette Rice, Entertainment Weekly. (2007-01-26). Retrieved on January 29, 2007.
  5. ^ Theater Review: Fairy-Tale Plottings of a British Royal Family. by Peter Marks, The New York Times. (1998-08-17). Retrieved on January 11, 2007.
  6. ^ Lahr, John. “Time Trials,” The New Yorker 28 July 2003. 88-91.
  7. ^ A Role That's Hard to Shake Off: The 9/11 Antihero. by Robin Finn, The New York Times. (2003-01-08). Retrieved on March 5, 2007.
  8. ^ Everything is Illuminated. RottenTomatoes.com. Retrieved on January 11, 2007.
  9. ^ Grissom feels the pressure on "CSI". MSNBC.com (2006-11-02). Retrieved on November 5, 2006.
  10. ^ http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20013570,00.html

[edit] External links

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