Liev Schreiber by Gage Skidmore.jpg

Isaac Liev Schreiber (; born October 4, 1967) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and narrator. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s after appearing in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the first three ''Scream'' horror films (1996-2000), '' Ransom'' (1996), '' Phantoms'' (1998), '' The Hurricane'' (1999), '' The Sum of All Fears'' (2002), ''The Manchurian Candidate'' (2004), ''The Omen'' (2006), '' Defiance'' (2008), '' X-Men Origins: Wolverine'' (2009), ''Taking Woodstock'' (2009), ''Salt'' (2010), '' Goon'' (2011), ''Pawn Sacrifice'' (2014), and ''Spotlight'' (2015), '' The 5th Wave'' (2016), and ''The French Dispatch'' (2021). He has also lent his voice to animated films such as '' My Little Pony: The Movie'' (2017), ''Isle of Dogs'', and '' Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse'' (both 2018).

Schreiber has also performed in several Broadway productions. In 2005, he won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in the play '' Glengarry Glen Ross''. That same year, he made his debut as a film director and writer with ''Everything Is Illuminated'' (2005), based on the 2002 novel of the same name. In 2010, he narrated the HBO documentary, "Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals". For his roles in television, he most notably portrayed the eponymous protagonist of the Showtime drama series ''Ray Donovan'' (2013–2020). The role has earned him five Golden Globe Award nominations and three Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He reprised the role in the television film '' Ray Donovan: The Movie'' (2022). He also narrates the HBO series '' Hard Knocks'' and ''24/7'', as well as various PBS programs.

Early life

Schreiber was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Heather Milgram, a painter, and Tell Schreiber, an actor and carpenter. His father is Protestant and his mother is Jewish. His maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram, emigrated from Ukraine. Milgram, who was the most significant male in Schreiber's youth, played the cello and owned Pierre-Auguste Renoir etchings, and made his living by delivering meat to restaurants. His mother, who is an aficionada of classical music and Russian literature, has said that she named Liev after her favorite Russian author, Leo Tolstoy, while his father has stated that Schreiber was named after the doctor who saved his mother's life. His family nickname, adopted when Schreiber was a baby, is "Huggy."

When Schreiber was one year old, his family moved to the unincorporated rural community of Winlaw, in the southern interior of British Columbia. Over the next four years, his mother was hospitalized on several occasions and underwent therapy related to a bad experience on LSD that she had near the beginning of her marriage (in San Francisco), according to Schreiber's father. After Schreiber's father threatened to have Schreiber's mother admitted to a mental institution, Schreiber's mother kidnapped Schreiber and "fled to a hippie commune in upstate New York. When Schreiber was 3, his dad kidnapped him back. His mother eventually won custody following an ugly legal battle".

When Schreiber was five, his parents divorced and a fierce custody battle ensued, bankrupting his maternal grandfather. His mother won custody, and the two moved to a cold water flat on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, where they lived for some time, frequently with no electricity, hot water, or even beds. It was during this period that Schreiber began his career in theater by enrolling in Joffrey Ballet School of New York.404 error

After his parents' divorce, Schreiber's father remained in British Columbia; Liev's half-brother, Pablo Schreiber, was born in British Columbia five years later. (Schreiber also has half-siblings from his mother's first marriage; they lived with their father in New York City while Liev was growing up.)

Schreiber has described his mother as a "far-out Socialist Labor Party hippie bohemian freak who hung out with William Burroughs". She was "a highly cultured eccentric" who earned a living by splitting her time between driving a cab and creating ''papier-mâché'' puppets." On Schreiber's 16th birthday, his mother bought him a motorcycle to "promote fearlessness." 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." Her bohemian proclivities led to actions such as making Schreiber take the Hindu name Shiva Das, wear yoga shirts, consume a vegetarian diet, and briefly attend Satchidananda Ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut when he was 12. Schreiber's mother also forbade her son from seeing color movies. As a result, his favorite actors were Charlie Chaplin, Andrew Cartwright, and Basil Rathbone. In retrospect, Schreiber said in a 2008 interview that he appreciates his mother's influences, saying: "Since I've had Sasha, I've completely identified with everything my mother went through raising me... and I think her choices were inspired."

Subsequently, Schreiber attended Friends Seminary, a Quaker school. In high school, played the bass clarinet.

Schreiber went on to attend Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he began his acting training at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, via the Five Colleges consortium. In March 1989, he played Antonio in ''The Merchant of Venice'' alongside Jeffrey Donovan. He later attended the Yale School of Drama, where he studied with Earle R. Gister and starred in Charles Evered's ''The Size of the World,'' directed by Walton Jones. He received a master's degree in drama from Yale in 1992. He also attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He originally wanted to be a screenwriter, eventually settling on acting.

Career

Early films

Schreiber had several supporting roles in various independent films until his big break, as the accused murderer Cotton Weary in the ''Scream'' trilogy of horror films. Though the success of the ''Scream'' trilogy led Schreiber to roles in several big-budget studio pictures, ''Entertainment Weekly'' wrote in 2007 that "Schreiber is tillbest known for such indie gems as ''Walking and Talking'', ''The Daytrippers'', and ''Big Night''."

After ''Scream,'' Schreiber was cast as Orson Welles in the HBO original movie ''RKO 281'', for which he was nominated for Emmy and Golden Globe awards. He then played supporting roles in several studio films, including Ron Howard's 1996 remake of '' Ransom'', the 1999 film '' The Hurricane'', ''A Walk on the Moon''; the 2000 movie version of ''Hamlet'', and as a spy in '' The Sum of All Fears''.

The 2004 remake of ''The Manchurian Candidate'', with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, was another major film for Schreiber, stirring some controversy as it opened during a heated presidential election cycle. Schreiber also played Robert Thorn with Julia Stiles in the 2006 film ''The Omen'', a remake of the 1976 horror classic. He played the time-traveling ex-boyfriend of Meg Ryan in the 2001 film ''Kate & Leopold'', also starring Hugh Jackman.

Shakespeare

Along with his screen work, Schreiber is a well-respected classical actor; in a 1998 review of the Shakespeare play ''Cymbeline'', ''The New York Times'' called his performance "revelatory" and ended the article with the plea, "More Shakespeare, Mr. Schreiber."
A year later, Schreiber played the title role in ''Hamlet'' in a December 1999 revival at The Public Theater, to similar raves. In 2000, he went on to play Laertes in the film ''Hamlet'', a modern adaptation of the play.

His performance in the title role of ''Henry V'' in a 2003 Central Park production of that play caused ''The New Yorker'' magazine critic John Lahr to expound upon his aptitude for playing Shakespeare characters. "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."

From June to July 2006, he played the title role in '' Macbeth'' opposite Jennifer Ehle at the Delacorte Theater.

Narration and voiceover work

Schreiber has narrated a number of documentaries, many of them aired as part of PBS series such as ''American Experience'', '' Nova'', and ''Secrets of the Dead'' from 2001 to 2011. He is the voice behind the television commercials for Infiniti. In 1995, he provided narration for the BBC
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