After a year at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, Liev Schreiber embarked on his professional career at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. The tall (6′2″), brooding actor with the youthful face and resonant voice originally wanted to be a writer, but was drawn to performing. In the early nineties, he first drew critical acclaim with parts in both On- and Off-Broadway productions. By the middle of that decade, he had moved to film, drawing notice for quirky and colorful characters that combined both menace and compassion such as the British bouncer with a thing for a librarian in the genial comedy Party Girl (1994), a drag queen seeking assistance on Christmas Eve from a suicide prevention center in Nora Ephron’s Mixed Nuts, or the semi-agoraphobic iconoclast looking for a way to meet girls in Denise Calls Up (1995).

The indie wunderkind (with a reputation for playing off-beat characters) graduated to big-time studio releases as one of the kidnappers in Ron Howard’s Ransom (1996) and later that year, essayed the role of accused killer Cotton Weary whose mere look inspired fear in Wes Craven’s blockbuster Scream (a role he reprised twice in Scream 2 and 3). The end of that decade found the actor even more in demand as he took roles in higher profile features alongside such Hollywood heavyweights as Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone in Sphere; Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, and Paul Newman in Twilight; Alan Arkin and Robin Williams in Jakob the Liar, and Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen in A Walk on the Moon.

The succeeding years have found the actor very much in demand both on screen and on stage. In 1998, he was again onstage in Central Park in the dual role of the god Jupiter and the villain Iachimo in Cymbeline, for which he received a 1999 Obie Award. while the following year saw him star as Hamlet at the New York Shakespeare Festival. In 1999, Schreiber’s deft performance in RKO 281 as Orson Welles, the similarly brilliant young actor and filmmaker who gave us Citizen Kane, earned him an Emmy nomination. In 2000, he made a compelling Laertes in Michael Almereyda’s modern-day film version of Hamlet and supported Oscar-winners Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt in Pay It Forward.

Every year since then has seen the actor in a successful Hollywood feature or returning with acclaim to the stage. In 2005, Schreiber secured a Tony for his performance in Glengarry Glen Ross, Joe Mantello’s high-octane revival of David Mamet’s play. Later that year, the actor made his feature screenwriting and directing debut with Everything Is Illuminated (screening at this year’s Virginia Film Festival), adapted from the critically-acclaimed novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a young American Jew’s journey to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II.

With growing demand for his sonorous voice in documentaries, Schreiber continues to offer his talents to successful stage and screen productions. In the summer of 2006, he played the title role in Macbeth opposite Jennifer Ehle at the New York Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. A film version of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, in which Schreiber co-stars with his real-life romantic companion Naomi Watts (King Kong), is currently in production for release later this year.