Schreiber was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Heather (née Milgram) and Tell Schreiber, a stage actor and director. His father is of Austrian, Irish, Swiss, and Scottish descent while his mother is Jewish, the descendant of immigrants from Poland, Ukraine and Germany. His mother says she named him after her favorite 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". When Schreiber was one year old, his family moved to Canada, but at age four, due to his parents' divorce, he and his siblings moved to New York City with his mother, where he grew up.
His mother was "a highly cultured eccentric" who supported them by splitting her time between driving a cab and creating papier-mâché puppets." On Schreiber's sixteenth birthday, his mother bought him a motorcycle, "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.” Schreiber's mother also forbade Schreiber from seeing color movies. As a result, his favorite actor was Charlie Chaplin. In the late seventies and early eighties Schreiber, known then as Shiva Das, lived at the Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville East, in Pomfret, CT. He also abided by his mother's vegetarian diet. Subsequently, Schreiber attended Friends Seminary, the same school attended by actress Amanda Peet when he was a senior and she was in sixth grade. Though athletic, he was unpopular and isolated in school, partially due to his bizarre home life and admitted incidents of stealing.
Schreiber went on to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where he began his acting training there and, via the Five Colleges consortium, which includes the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 1992, where he starred in Charles Evered's The Size of the World, directed by Walton Jones. He also attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He originally wanted to be a screenwriter, but was steered toward acting instead.
Schreiber has a half sister and four half brothers, one of whom, Pablo, is also an actor. He enjoys basketball, fencing, cycling, and has played football in the past. Although there were rumors that they had married, Schreiber is dating British-Australian actress Naomi Watts (with whom he appeared in The Painted Veil). Their son Alexander Pete was born on July 25, 2007.
Watts is expecting her second child.
Quick Info
Born Isaac Liev Schreiber
October 4, 1967, San Francisco, California, U.S.
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