Oct 4, 1967

San Francisco, California, USA

Liev Schreiber (born Isaac Liev Schreiber) is a Tony Award-winning American actor. 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 series.
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Schreiber was born in San Francisco, California to Tell Schreiber, a stage actor and director, and Heather Milgram. Schreiber is of Jewish heritage on his mother's side; his maternal grandfather immigrated from the Ukraine in ... ... (read more...) 1918. His mother claims that 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 a 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.
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Schreiber had several supporting roles in various independent films until his big break, as the accused murderer Cotton Weary in the horror film Scream. Schreiber had no lines in the first film, but would go on to play a bigger role in its sequels, Scream 2 and Scream 3. Though the success of the Scream series would lead Schreiber to roles in several big-budget studio pictures, Entertainment Weekly wrote in 2007 that "Schreiber is [still] best known for such indie gems as Walking and Talking, The Daytrippers, and Big Night."

After Scream, Schreiber portrayed the young Orson Welles in the HBO original movie RKO 281, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award. He appeared as Laertes in the 2000 movie version of the Hamlet. Then, he played supporting roles in several studio films, including The Hurricane with Denzel Washington, and The Sum of All Fears with Ben Affleck. The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Washington and Meryl Streep, was another major film for the actor, stirring some controversy as it opened during a heated presidential election cycle.