A baby-faced, deep-voiced character player and occasional lead, Liev Schreiber (first name pronounce LEE-ev, like the city of Kiev) came to the business fortified with impeccable training, boasting a year at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. Embarking on his professional career at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, the tall (6'2") San Francisco-born, Manhattan-bred actor won notice on Broadway in "In the Summer House" (1993) and Off-Broadway in "All For One" and "Good Night, Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet" (the latter with Hope Davis). In his first big screen outing, he combined both menace and kindliness as the British bouncer with a thing for Parker Posey's librarian in the genial comedy "Party Girl" (1994). That same year, he was featured (along with Posey) as a drag queen seeking assistance on Christmas Eve from a suicide prevention center run by Steve Martin in Nora Ephron's disastrous "Mixed Nuts". "Denise Calls Up" (1995) cast the actor as Jerry, the semi-agoraphobic iconoclast that Tim Daly is determined to match with a girl, while "Walking and Talking" (1996) saw him play Anne Heche's sponging ex-boyfriend.
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". (Of course, he reprised the role in the sequels "Scream 2" (1997) and "Scream 3" (1999) to good effect, milking menace from even the most innocent of encounters.)
Schreiber proved hilarious reteaming with Parker Posey as her the garrulous writer-boyfriend in the independent hit "The Daytrippers" (1997). The busy actor found roles in a number of features of varying quality that cast him alongside Hollywood heavyweights: he was an astrophysicist investigating an mysterious underwater "Sphere" alongside Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone while in "Twilight" (both 1998), the actor played a heavy romancing the nubile daughter of Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon who runs afoul of private eye Paul Newman. Schreiber then supported Alan Arkin and Robin Williams in the remake "Jakob the Liar", appeared as the cuckold husband of Diane Lane in Tony Goldwyn's directorial debut "A Walk on the Moon" and had a featured role as one of the do-gooding Canadians who helped spring boxer Rubin Carter from jail in "The Hurricane" (all 1999).
Perhaps his most memorable and critically acclaimed performance to date--as Orson Welles in the HBO production of "RKO 281"--came that year as well, earning Schreiber a much-deserved Emmy nomination for his deft portrayal of the brilliant young actor/filmmaker who gave us "Citizen Kane". The following year, 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" (also 2000), a heartwarming fable about an entire town that decides to commit random acts of kindness. Schreiber then co-starred with Jeanne Tripplehorn in "Dial 9 for Love" (2001), a drama that cast him as a married man whose wife leaves him because he is unfaithful and who then unknowingly engages in an honest, passionate phone relationship with her, and added charm to the thankless role of Meg Ryan's ex-beau in the romantic comedy "Kate & Leopold" (2001).
Schrieber ably took over the role of novelist Tom Clancy's mercenary character John Clark (first played on screen by Willem DeFoe) for the fourth film in Paramount's Jack Ryan series, "The Sum of All Fears" (2002), then scored in a pair of historically minded television biopics: "Young Dr. Freud" (2002) and "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" (2003). The actor next played a reluctant Republican campaign advisor dispatched to Moscow to aid the 1996 re-election of Russian president Boris Yeltsin in the satrical "Spinning Boris" (2003). Schreiber finest and most high-profile performance to date came with director Jonathan Demme's risky but successful attempt to remake the 1962 classic conspiracy thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004). Assuming the role first played by Laurence Harvey, Schreiber played vice-presidential candidate Raymond Shaw, who may have been programmed by secret forces to become a sleeper agent within the White House. The actor delivered a knockout performance as a man plagued by bizarre inconsistencies and unreal memories, attempting to find the strength to uncover the truth about himself.
Like many actors of his generation, Schreiber has alternated between films and stage, amassing a handful of impressive NYC credits. He co-starred with Patrick Stewart in the New York Shakespeare Festival's Central Park staging of "The Tempest" and then played Jason Robards' son in Harold Pinter's "Moonlight" (both 1995). After participating in a staged reading of Wendy Wasserstein's "An American Daughter" with Meryl Streep in Seattle in 1996, Schreiber returned to Off-Broadway playing Banquo to Alec Baldwin's "Macbeth" in the spring of 1998. That summer, he was again onstage in Central Park in the dual role of the god Jupiter and the villain Iachimo in "Cymbeline"--for which he recieved a 1999 Obie Award--while the following year saw him star as "Hamlet" at the New York Shakespeare Festival. From late 2000 to 2001 he starred in Pinter's "Betrayal" produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company with Juliette Binoche and John Slattery; in 2002 he took the role of Ben in "The Mercy Seat" by Neil LaBute at the Acorn Theater; and he played the lead in the 2003 Shakespeare in Central Park production of "Henry V."
Possessing a mellifluent voice that lends itself well to voice-overs, Schreiber has found a lucrative secondary career proving narration for numerous TV documentaries--especially on the topic of sports--including PBS' "Rock & Roll" (1995), HBO's "Babe Ruth" (1998), "The Vikings" (PBS, 2000), "Ali-Frazier I: One Nation... Divisible" (2000), "Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team" (2001), the series "Secrets of the Dead" (2001), "A City on Fire: The Story of the '68 Detroit Tigers" (2002), "O.J.: A Study in Black & White" (2002) and "Colosseum: A Gladiator's Story" (2003).
Copyright © Baseline 2006.