Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg, (1946- ). US film director and producer, the most successful in motion-picture history. Spielberg began to direct for TV and the cinema while still in his early twenties. He enjoyed his first big success with the shark shocker Jaws (1975), which became the industry’s biggest hit to date. Subsequent triumphs included Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the action fantasy Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its two sequels, and the science-fiction tearjerker E.T.: the Extraterrestrial (1982), which again broke all box-office records. Two more serious films, The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987), proved less successful with the public. In 1993 Spielberg enjoyed a double triumph with Schindler’s List, a masterly drama of the Holocaust, and Jurassic Park, which features convincing computer-animated dinosaurs. While the former brought Spielberg Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture, the latter quickly established itself as the most commercially successful film of all time.
