• Steven Spielberg is a highly successful and influential movie director, writer and producer. He is the highest-grossing director of all time, as his movies have collectively pulled in approximately $8 billion at the box office. He has been nominated for six Best Director Oscars, while seven of his movies have been nominated for Best Picture. In 2009 Spielberg was awarded the Cecil B. Demille Award for lifetime achievement by the Hollywood Foreign Press on the Golden Globes.

  According to the New York Daily News, Spielberg's charity Wunderkids had invested about 70% of its capital with Bernard Madoff, the fund investor who revealed in early December 2008 that his fund was a complete fraud.New York Daily News: Daily News Owner Mort Zuckerman Madoff Victim (December 15, 2008)

• 1. Born: December 18, 1946
  2. Academy Awards: 3
  3. Estimated net worth: $3 billion
  4. Co-founder of movie studio DreamWorks SKG
  5. Often collaborates with George Lucas

• Awards

  Of all these nominations, Spielberg has won two Best Director Oscars for Schindler's List in 1993 and Saving Private Ryan in 1998. He also won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1987 for his body of work as a producer.

• King of the Blockbuster

  Spielberg directed the first official "blockbuster" film, Jaws in 1975. From there, he went on to make some of the biggest and most memorable films in cinema history, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, E.T. in 1982, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1987, and Jurassic Park in 1993.

• Another Indy

  In 2008, Spielberg directed the much-anticipated fourth installment of the Indiana Jones film series, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

• Dealing DreamWorks

  Spielberg co-founded DreamWorks SKG with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen in 1994; the company was sold to Paramount Pictures in 2006.

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