Famous Half-Jews: Liev Schreiber

[Gary Freedman]

Liev Schreiber (born October 4, 1967) is an American actor, director and screenwriter. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s, having initially appeared in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the Scream trilogy of horror films. Schreiber is also a respected stage actor, performing in several Broadway productions. In 2005, Schreiber won a Tony Award for his performance in the play Glengarry Glen Ross. That year, Schreiber also made his debut as a film director and writer with Everything Is Illuminated, based on the novel of the same name.

Schreiber is in a relationship with Naomi Watts, with whom he has two children.

Schreiber was born Isaac Liev Schreiber in San Francisco, California, the son of Heather (née Milgram) and Tell Schreiber, a stage actor and director. His mother already had three sons when he was born, while his father was 22 years old, and seven years her junior. Schreiber's father, who is of Austrian, Swiss, Irish and Scottish descent, was from a blueblood and wealthy society family from Bucks County, Pennsylvania; he graduated from Dartmouth and was a wrestling and football star. Schreiber's mother, who now lives on an ashram in Virginia, was born to a Brooklyn working-class household of Jewish Communists, descended from immigrants from Poland, Ukraine and Germany; she was a highly cultured eccentric, with a firm knowledge of classical music and Russian literature, and has been described by Schreiber as “this far-out Socialist Labor Party hippie bohemian freak who hung out with [William] Burroughs.” When Heather was twelve, her own mother, Liev's grandmother, was lobotomized. His mother says she named him after her favorite Russian 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".

Incidentally, Schreiber was the voice of Sigmund Freud in the David Grubin documentary that was broadcast on public television the night before Thanksgiving in 2002. Great show! Schreiber did a fantasic German accent.