Isaac Liev Schreiber (/ˈliːɛv ˈʃraɪbər/; born October 4, 1967) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and narrator. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s after appearing in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the first three Scream horror films (1996-2000), Ransom (1996), Phantoms (1998), The Hurricane (1999),Kate & Leopold (2001),The Sum of All Fears (2002), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Omen (2006), Defiance (2008), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Taking Woodstock (2009), Salt (2010), Goon (2011), Pawn Sacrifice (2014), Spotlight (2015), The 5th Wave (2016), and The French Dispatch (2021). He has also lent his voice to animated films such as My Little Pony: The Movie (2017), Isle of Dogs, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (both 2018).
Schreiber has also performed in several Broadway productions. In 2005, he won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in the play Glengarry Glen Ross. That same year, he made his debut as a film director and writer with Everything Is Illuminated (2005), based on the 2002 novel of the same name. In 2010, he narrated the HBO documentary, "Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals". For his roles in television, he most notably portrayed the eponymous protagonist of the Showtime drama series Ray Donovan (2013–2020). The role has earned him five Golden Globe Award nominations and three Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He reprised the role in the television film Ray Donovan: The Movie (2022). He also narrates the HBO series Hard Knocks and 24/7, as well as various PBS programs.
Early life
Schreiber was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Heather Milgram, a painter, and Tell Schreiber, an actor and carpenter. His father is Protestant and his mother is Jewish. His maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram, emigrated from Ukraine. Milgram, who was the most significant male in Schreiber's youth, played the cello and owned Pierre-Auguste Renoir etchings, and made his living by delivering meat to restaurants. His mother, who is an aficionada of classical music and Russian literature, has said that she named Liev 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. His family nickname, adopted when Schreiber was a baby, is "Huggy."
When Schreiber was one year old, his family moved to the unincorporated rural community of Winlaw, in the southern interior of British Columbia. Over the next four years, his mother was hospitalized on several occasions and underwent therapy related to a bad experience on LSD that she had near the beginning of her marriage (in San Francisco), according to Schreiber's father. After Schreiber's father threatened to have Schreiber's mother admitted to a mental institution, Schreiber was kidnapped by his mother, eventually leading to his mother gaining full custody of him. They squatted on the Lower East Side in New York City.
Schreiber has described his mother as a "far-out Socialist Labor Party hippie bohemian freak who hung out with William Burroughs". She was "a highly cultured eccentric" who earned a living by splitting her time between driving a cab and creating papier-mâché puppets." In 1983, his mother bought him a motorcycle on his 16th birthday to "promote fearlessness." The critic John Lahr wrote in a 1999 New Yorker profile that, "To a large extent, Schreiber's professional shape-shifting and his uncanny instinct for isolating the frightened, frail, goofy parts of his characters are a result of being forced to adapt to his mother's eccentricities. It's both his grief and his gift."
Her bohemian proclivities led to actions such as making Schreiber take the Hindu name Shiva Das, wear yoga shirts, consume a vegetarian diet, and briefly attend Satchidananda Ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut when he was 12. Schreiber's mother also forbade her son from seeing color movies. As a result, his favorite actors were Charlie Chaplin, Andrew Cartwright, and Basil Rathbone. 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."
Subsequently, Schreiber attended Friends Seminary, a Quaker school. In high school, Liev played the bass clarinet.
Schreiber went on to attend Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he began his acting training at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, via the Five Colleges consortium. In March 1989, he played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice alongside Jeffrey Donovan. He later attended the Yale School of Drama, where he studied with Earle R. Gister and starred in Charles Evered's The Size of the World, directed by Walton Jones. He received a master's degree in drama from Yale in 1992. He also atten
