50 facts about Liev Schreiber: made his debut as a film director and writer with Everything Is Illuminated

Schreiber's mother forbade Schreiber from seeing color movies. As a result, his favorite actors were Charlie Chaplin and Basil Rathbone. Learn 50 facts about actor Liev Schreiber.

1. His full name is Isaac Liev Schreiber.

2. He is not only an actor but also producer, director, and screenwriter.

3. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s, having appeared in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the Scream trilogy of horror films, Phantoms, The Sum of All Fears, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Salt, Taking Woodstock, and Goon.

4. Schreiber is also a respected stage actor, having performed in several Broadway productions.

5. In 2005, he won a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor for his performance in the play Glengarry Glen Ross.

6. He made his debut as a film director and writer with Everything Is Illuminated, based on the novel of the same name.

7. He also plays the eponymous lead character on the Showtime series Ray Donovan.

8. He narrates the HBO series 24/7, as well as various PBS programs.

9. Schreiber was born in San Francisco, California.

10. He is the son of Heather (née Milgram) and Tell Carroll Schreiber, a stage actor and director.

11. His father is from a wealthy Protestant society family from Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

12. His father's family had lived in the United States for many generations, and his ancestry includes German, Swiss-German, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Irish, Norwegian, Belgian (Flemish), Scottish, and Welsh.

13. Schreiber's mother, who now lives on an ashram in Virginia, was born into a Brooklyn working-class household of communists.

14. His mother's family was Jewish (descended from immigrants from Poland and Russia).

15. With a firm knowledge of classical music and Russian literature, Schreiber's mother has been described by Schreiber as a "far-out Socialist Labor Party hippie bohemian freak who hung out with William Burroughs".

16. His mother has said that she named him 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.

17. His family nickname, adopted when Schreiber was a baby, is "Huggy".

18. When Schreiber was one year old, his family moved to Canada, winding up in the unincorporated rural area of Winlaw, British Columbia. It was here that his half-brother, actor Pablo Schreiber, was born.

19. His mother was "a highly cultured eccentric" who supported them by splitting her time between driving a cab and creating papier-mâché puppets."

20. On Schreiber's 16th birthday, his mother bought him a motorcycle "to promote fearlessness."

21. In high school, Liev played the bass clarinet.

22. Schreiber's mother also forbade Schreiber from seeing color movies. As a result, his favorite actors were Charlie Chaplin and Basil Rathbone.

23. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Schreiber, known then as Shiva Das, lived at the Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville East, in Pomfret, Connecticut.

24. He also abided by his mother's vegetarian diet.

25. 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."

26. Subsequently, Schreiber attended Friends Seminary at the same time as future actress Amanda Peet.

27. Schreiber went on to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where he began his acting training at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, via the Five Colleges consortium.

28. In March 1989, Liev played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice alongside Jeffrey Donovan.

29. Liev graduated with a master's degree from the Yale School of Drama in 1992, where he starred in Charles Evered's The Size of the World, directed by Walton Jones.

30. At Yale, Liev studied with Earle R. Gister.

31. He also attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

32. He originally wanted to be a screenwriter but was steered toward acting instead.

33. 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.

34. 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 [still] best known for such indie gems as Walking and Talking, The Daytrippers, and Big Night."

35. After Scream, Schreiber was cast as the young Orson Welles in the HBO original movie RKO 281, for which he was nominated for Emmy and Golden Globe Awards.

36. He then played supporting roles in several studio films, including Ron Howard's 1996 remake of Ransom, with Mel Gibson, The Hurricane, with Denzel Washington, the 2000 movie version of Hamlet, with Ethan Hawke, and, as Tom Clancy's fictional C.I.A. super spy and assassin John Clark, in The Sum of All Fears, with Ben Affleck.

37. The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Washington and Meryl Streep, was another major film for Schreiber, stirring some controversy as it opened during a heated presidential election cycle.

38. Schreiber also played Robert Thorn with Julia Stiles in the 2006 film The Omen, a remake of the 1976 horror classic The Omen.

39. He played the time-traveling ex-boyfriend of Meg Ryan in Kate and Leopold, also starring Hugh Jackman.

40. Along with his screen work, Schreiber is a well-respected classical actor.

41. 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."

42. A year later, Schreiber played the title role in Hamlet in a December 1999 revival at The Public Theater, to similar raves.

43. In 2000, he went on to play Laertes in the film Hamlet, a modern adaptation of the play.

44. 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 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."

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

46. Schreiber has narrated a number of documentaries, along with Michael G. Stanton, many of them aired as part of PBS series such as American Experience, Nova, and Secrets of the Dead from 2001 to 2011.

47. He is also the voice behind the television commercials for Infiniti.

48. In 1995, he provided narration for the BBC/WGBH documentary co-production Rock & Roll.

49. In 1994, he narrated Two Billion Hearts, the official film of 1994 World Cup.

50. In 2010, he returned to Broadway in A View from the Bridge for which he received a Tony nomination for Best Leading Actor in a Play.

Source: Wikipedia.org