The king of entertainment! From Indiana Jones to Jaws, Steven Spielberg is one of the most well-known and successful directors of all time.
The E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial director was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in December 1946, though his family moved to Phoenix 10 years later, where he spent his formative years. Spielberg’s interest in film started at a young age where he spent time making adventure films and later moving to California to pursue a film career.
Spielberg made his directorial debut with the 1974 film The Sugarland Express. The following year he was given the opportunity to direct the iconic shark thriller Jaws, which went on to win three Oscars.
“I credit Jaws with everything, being a movie director, having final cut. Jaws gave me freedom, and I’ve never lost my freedom,” the Amblin Entertainment cofounder told the Directors Guild of America in a 2006 interview. “But the experience of making Jaws was horrendous for me. And it was partially because the script was unfinished and we were all making it up as we went along.”
After the enormous success of Jaws, Spielberg went on to direct several huge box-office successes including 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and 1981’s Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Though the Post director took a brief hiatus while starting his production company Amblin Entertainment in the late ‘80s, he took the next decade by storm with 1993’s Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan.
Following decades of his highly accomplished directing career, Spielberg decided to create the semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans, which was released in 2022. He came up with the idea for the film when the pandemic first hit.
“I started thinking, what’s the one story I haven’t told that I’d be really mad at myself if I don’t?” Spielberg said in a November 2022 New York Times interview. “It was always the same answer every time: the story of my formative years growing up between 7 and 18.”
Spielberg went on to share that the story was very difficult to tell at first due to how personal it got.
“This story was no longer going to be about metaphor. It was going to be about lived experiences, and what was difficult was facing the fact that I might really tell the story,” he explained in the same interview.
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Keep scrolling for a look back at Spielberg’s life and career over the years: