Liev Schreiber

Isaac Liev Schreiber was born on October 4, 1967, in San Francisco, California, to Heather Milgram, a painter, and Tell Schreiber, an actor and carpenter. His father was Protestant and his mother Jewish, and his maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram, had emigrated from the Russian Empire. The family relocated when Schreiber was one year old to Winlaw, an unincorporated rural community in the southern interior of British Columbia. His mother later gained full custody of him, and the two eventually settled on the Lower East Side of New York City. His mother gave him the Hindu name Shiva Das, required him to follow a vegetarian diet, and briefly enrolled him at Satchidananda Ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut, when he was twelve. She also prohibited him from watching color films, which led Schreiber to develop a particular admiration for Charlie Chaplin, Andrew Cartwright, and Basil Rathbone. On his sixteenth birthday in 1983, she gave him a motorcycle to, in her words, promote fearlessness. Schreiber subsequently attended Friends Seminary, a Quaker school, where he played bass clarinet.

He pursued his education at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, beginning his acting training through the Five Colleges consortium at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In March 1989, he played Antonio in a production of The Merchant of Venice alongside Jeffrey Donovan. He went on to attend the Yale School of Drama, studying with Earle R. Gister and appearing in Charles Evered's The Size of the World, directed by Walton Jones. Yale awarded him a master's degree in drama in 1992. He also trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Schreiber's stage career began in 1992 at the Classic Stage Company, where he appeared in Ann-Marie MacDonald's comedic play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). His Broadway career spans from 1993 to 2024 and includes productions such as In the Summer House, Doubt, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, A View From the Bridge, and The 24 Hour Plays 2004. He made his Broadway debut playing Eliot in Jane Bowles's In the Summer House, acting opposite Frances Conroy. His most celebrated stage achievement came in 2005, when he won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for portraying Richard Roma in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, a role that also earned him a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance that same year. He received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play in 2010. Additional Tony nominations followed for Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio in 2007, Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge in 2010, and John Patrick Shanley's Doubt in 2024. He also appeared in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 2016.

Schreiber made his feature film debut in 1994 as Chris in Nora Ephron's dark comedy Mixed Nuts, starring Steve Martin. Supporting roles in Mad Love and Party Girl followed in 1995, and 1996 brought his first leading film roles in Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers and Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking. That same year he appeared in Big Night and began his association with the Scream franchise, playing accused murderer Cotton Weary across the first three films in the series from 1996 to 2000. Ron Howard's Ransom also featured Schreiber in 1996. He portrayed Orson Welles in the HBO film RKO 281 in 1999, a performance that earned him nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Television Film. Further film credits from this period include The Hurricane (1999), the 2000 adaptation of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke, Kate & Leopold (2001) with Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman, and the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep.

His subsequent film work includes The Painted Veil (2006), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Pawn Sacrifice (2014), and the ensemble journalism drama Spotlight (2015). He made his directorial debut with Everything Is Illuminated in 2005. Schreiber also appeared in three films directed by Wes Anderson: Isle of Dogs (2018), The French Dispatch (2021), and Asteroid City (2023).

On television, Schreiber is most recognized for portraying the title character in the Showtime drama series Ray Donovan, which ran from 2013 to 2020, a role he reprised in the 2022 television film Ray Donovan: The Movie. The character earned him nominations for three Primetime Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards. He portrayed Otto Frank in the National Geographic miniseries A Small Light in 2023. Across his career, Schreiber has received a total of nine Primetime Emmy Award nominations and five Golden Globe Award nominations.