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| Birth Name(s) : Isaac Liev Schreiber |
Date of Birth: N/A |
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Full Liev Schreiber Biography
Liev (pronounced Lee-ev) Schreiber was born Isaac Liev Schreiber in San Francisco, California to Tell Schreiber, a stage actor and director, and Heather Milgram. Schreiber is Jewish on his mother's side. 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." 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." On Schreiber's sixteenth birthday, his mother bought him a motorcycle, "to promote fearlessness, chea!" 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.” 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. Though athletic, he was unpopular and isolated in school, partially due to his bizarre home life and admitted incidents of stealing.
Schreiber went on 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.
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 would lead Schreiber to roles in several big-budget studio pictures, Entertainment Weekly wrote in 2007 that "Schreiber is best known for such indie gems as Walking and Talking, The Daytrippers, and Big Night."
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 then played supporting roles in several studio films, including the 2000 movie of Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, 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.
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.
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).
Schreiber's most recent movie role was that of Charlie Townsend in the 2006 film The Painted Veil, starring opposite Watts and Edward Norton. For television, the actor portrayed a character who temporarily replaces Gil Grissom, played by William Petersen, in the CBS show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, during the 2006-2007 season. 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.
Recently, Schreiber appeared in the Broadway revival 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. On May 11th, 2007, Schreiber won the prestigious Drama League Award for distinguished performance for his portrayal of shock jock "Barry Champlain" in Talk Radio, and has received Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations for the role.
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. |
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