Liev Schreiber — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
Isaac Liev Schreiber was born in San Francisco on 4 October 1967, the son of Tell Schreiber, a stage actor, and Heather Milgram, a painter. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his mother's father. His mother, a reader of Russian literature, has said she named him after her favourite author, Leo Tolstoy; his father has said he was named after a doctor who had saved his mother's life. The actor Pablo Schreiber is his half-brother.
His maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram, emigrated from the Russian Empire; where in the Empire he came from is not recorded in published sources. In New York he drove a meat-delivery truck, played the cello and painted in oils. After Schreiber's parents separated when he was a small boy, his grandfather spent his savings supporting mother and son, who lived on the Lower East Side while she drove a cab; he took the boy to the circus and to baseball games and introduced him to Judaism through the seders at his home.
Schreiber became known in the 1990s both in independent films and in the Scream series, as Cotton Weary. His portrayal of the young Orson Welles in the television film RKO 281 (1999) brought him Golden Globe and Emmy nominations, and the New York Times called him the finest American theatre actor of his generation. In 2005 he won the Tony Award as Richard Roma in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, and in 2007 the Drama League Award for Talk Radio.
The same year as his Tony he released his first film as writer and director, Everything Is Illuminated, adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer's novel about an American who travels to Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather. Schreiber has described the film as a tribute to his own grandfather, whose death had left him with questions he could no longer ask. In 2008 he played Zus Bielski, one of the brothers who led a Jewish partisan group in the Belarusian forests, in Defiance, and in 2009 Sabretooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
From 2013 to 2020 he played the title role in the Showtime drama Ray Donovan, a fixer working in Los Angeles, which brought him several Golden Globe and Emmy nominations.
Tracing the roots — Russian Empire — maternal grandfather Alex Milgram (town not documented)
His maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram, emigrated from the Russian Empire; a meat-truck driver who played the cello and painted, he helped raise Schreiber in New York. Schreiber has called his film Everything Is Illuminated a tribute to him.
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Russian Empire — maternal grandfather Alex Milgram (town not documented). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.