Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg knew he was different long before he understood why. Reading took much longer for him than for his classmates; his dyslexia would go undiagnosed for decades. In neighborhoods with few other Jewish families, children mocked his name and religion. He became a practiced observer, studying a room from the edge and trying to work out how to enter it.

The family movie camera gave that distance a purpose. His father, Arnold, an engineer, put the camera in Steven’s hands and let him record trips and experiments. His mother, Leah, a pianist with an exuberant imagination, encouraged productions that grew steadily more elaborate. Steven enlisted his sisters and friends, staged train wrecks, and devised special effects. Behind the camera, he could invite people into a world of his making.

A camera could not stop the bullying or mend the fractures that later opened in his family. It could let him author what he saw. “Most of my friends were made through the camera,” Spielberg later said. He learned to turn fear into suspense and loneliness into story. His parents could not have foreseen the career ahead. They did something more immediate: they trusted him with the tool that helped him understand his place in the world.