Steven Spielberg

(born Dec. 18, 1946, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.) U.S. film director and producer. About the time of his graduation from California State College, Long Beach (1970), he attracted the attention of Universal Pictures with a short film he made. As a director of television movies, he made the thriller Duel (1971), and in 1974 he directed the feature film The Sugarland Express. His shark-attack thriller Jaws (1975) became one of the highest-grossing movies ever, and he went on to direct huge successes such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). He received Academy Awards for directing Schindler's List (1993), which tells the story of a group of Polish Jews who avoided Nazi extermination camps through the heroic actions of a German industrialist, and Saving Private Ryan (1998), which followed American soldiers in the days after the Normandy invasion of 1944. His other movies include The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), Jurassic Park (1993), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002), Munich (2005), and War Horse (2011). In 1994 he cofounded DreamWorks SKG, a film, animation, and television production company; it was sold to Viacom in 2006.