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Notable people · Entertainment · Film

Steven Spielberg

Cincinnati-born film director of Jaws, E.T., Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, and founder of the USC Shoah Foundation.

Born December 18, 1946, Cincinnati (family home on Lexington Avenue, Avondale)

Steven Spielberg
Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

At a glance

Born
December 18, 1946, Cincinnati (family home on Lexington Avenue, Avondale) (Hamilton County) source
Also known as
Steven Spielberg
Known as
Entertainment, Film

Steven Spielberg is living. This page covers their public life only, from published sources. Correct this page · hello@crackedbuckeye.com

Life story

Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati on December 18, 1946, to two Cincinnati natives: Arnold Spielberg, a Hughes High School graduate studying electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati, and Leah Posner, a pianist from Walnut Hills High School. The family lived on Lexington Avenue in Avondale until 1949, when Arnold finished at UC and took an engineering job with RCA in New Jersey; they later moved to Phoenix and California. Spielberg directed Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the Indiana Jones films, and won Academy Awards for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. He used his profits from Schindler's List to found the Shoah Foundation in 1994, which records the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Ohio claims him by birth and through his parents' deep Cincinnati roots; he has said he learned his numbers from the tattooed arms of Holocaust survivors his grandmother taught English in Cincinnati.

Ohio ties

  • Avondale, Cincinnati (1946-1949)
    birthplace and infancy; the family lived at 817 Lexington Avenue, across from the synagogue where they worshipped Hamilton County · source
  • Cincinnati (1920s-1949)
    hometown of both parents: Arnold Spielberg (Hughes High School; University of Cincinnati electrical engineering, 1949; co-op at Crosley Corp.) and Leah Posner (Walnut Hills High School; piano at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music) Hamilton County · source
  • Columbus (2018 (film set in 2045))
    setting of his film Ready Player One; Birmingham, England stood in for Columbus during filming Franklin County · source

Timeline

  1. 1917 His father, Arnold Spielberg, was born on February 6 in Cincinnati and grew up on Windham Avenue in Avondale. source
  2. 1920 His mother, Leah Frances Posner, was born on January 12 in Cincinnati. source
  3. 1945 Arnold Spielberg, home from World War II, married Leah Posner; he was studying electrical engineering at UC and working as a co-op at Crosley Corp. source
  4. 1946 Steven Allan Spielberg was born on December 18 in Cincinnati, while the family lived on Lexington Avenue in Avondale. source
  5. 1949 Arnold graduated from the University of Cincinnati in electrical engineering, turned down a job at Crosley, and moved the family to New Jersey to work for RCA in Camden. source
  6. 1957 The family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where as a boy he began making amateur 8 mm films. source
  7. 1971 Directed the television film Duel, his feature-length debut. source
  8. 1975 Jaws was released and made him a household name. source
  9. 1982 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released; the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1994. source
  10. 1994 Won the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for Schindler's List, and founded the Shoah Foundation to record Holocaust survivors' testimony. source
  11. 1999 Won a second Best Director Oscar for Saving Private Ryan and received the Defense Department's Medal for Distinguished Public Service for the film. source
  12. 2006 Sent a film crew to Cincinnati to interview his father's boyhood friends from Avondale, a gift for Arnold's 90th birthday in February 2007. source
  13. 2006 Received Kennedy Center Honors on December 3. source
  14. 2015 President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on November 24. source
  15. 2018 Released Ready Player One, set in a future Columbus, Ohio. source
  16. 2020 Arnold Spielberg, a Cincinnati native and 1949 UC electrical engineering graduate who had served as a radio operator with the 490th Bomb Squadron, died at 103. source
  17. 2022 Released The Fabelmans, a film based on his own childhood, co-written with Tony Kushner and announced in March 2021. source

Stories

Numbers on an arm in Cincinnati

At the family's home in Cincinnati, Spielberg's grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors, and the survivors in turn taught the small boy his numbers. He later recalled one man who pointed to the numbers tattooed on his forearm during the dinner break: that is a two, that is a four, that is a nine. Then the man turned his arm over and showed him that the nine became a six, and called it magic. Spielberg said the irony and the gift of that lesson did not dawn on him until he was much older. His father had lost between sixteen and twenty relatives in the Holocaust, and the subject was always on his mind; decades later he made Schindler's List and used his share of its profits to start the Shoah Foundation.

Source

A boyhood on Windham Avenue

In a 2006 interview for the Rutgers Oral History Archives, Arnold Spielberg described growing up in Avondale. He was born in 1917 at Bethesda Hospital on Reading Road, and his parents, immigrants from Ukraine, moved from Walnut Hills to Windham Avenue. He called it the best street for a kid to grow up on, steep enough for sledding, with a park, ballfield and woods at the bottom. He went to Avondale Public School two blocks away and joined a Jewish Boy Scout troop that broke up before he made First Class. He noted that his son Steven later went all the way to Eagle Scout.

Source

The Cincinnati film that was never made

After his sister Anne Spielberg co-wrote the 1988 film Big, Spielberg talked about producing an autobiographical film, written by Anne, about the family's years in Cincinnati. The script needed revisions and the film was never made. In 2006 he sent a crew to Cincinnati to interview his father's childhood friends from Avondale, and gave the finished film to Arnold for his 90th birthday in February 2007. His own childhood film, The Fabelmans, finally came in 2022, but it begins after the family left Ohio.

Source

Columbus in 2045, filmed in Birmingham

Ready Player One (2018), adapted from Ernest Cline's novel, follows Wade Watts, an orphan living in a dystopian Columbus, Ohio. None of it was filmed in Ohio. In August and September 2016 the production shot in Birmingham, England, which stood in for Columbus, using Livery Street in the Jewellery Quarter, the Ludgate Hill car park and Digbeth. Some Birmingham landmarks were removed digitally and replaced with computer-generated buildings to create a future Ohio.

Source

Sites to know

Homes, graves, markers, museums and monuments; the numbered ones are on the map.

1
  • 1 Site of the Spielberg family apartment, 817 Lexington Avenue, Avondale (demolished)
    Cincinnati Hamilton County · source
  • Former Lexington Avenue synagogue (now Southern Baptist Church), across the street from the family home (unknown)
    Avondale, Cincinnati Hamilton County · source

Ohio places

Where Steven Spielberg was born, lived, worked and is remembered, with the ZIP code, town and county pages for each.

Myths and corrections

Things often said about Steven Spielberg, and what the record shows.

Often said Spielberg grew up in Cincinnati, or the family stayed in Cincinnati until 1952.

The record He lived in Cincinnati only as a baby and toddler. Cincinnati's own reporting says the family left Lexington Avenue for New Jersey in 1949, when Arnold graduated from UC and joined RCA in Camden; his sister Anne was born in Philadelphia that year. The 1952 date that Wikipedia gives is the family's later move to Haddon Township, New Jersey. His childhood memories are of New Jersey, Phoenix and California. source

Documents

Primary records: patents, letters, court and government files, nominations and old county histories, each at the archive that holds it.

Pictures

Free to use with the credit shown. Select a picture for the original and its license.

  • Peter Deyell, Steven Spielberg, Allen Daviau
    Peter Deyell, Steven Spielberg, Allen Daviau
    Public domain
  • Steven Spielberg at Hollywood Walk of Fame
    Steven Spielberg at Hollywood Walk of Fame
    Public domain
  • Director Steven Spielberg and Eric Bruno Borgman on the set of Amistad.
    Director Steven Spielberg and Eric Bruno Borgman on the set of Amistad.
    Public domain
  • Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, (left) presents a framed citation accompanying the en:Department of Defense Medal
    Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, (left) presents a framed citation accompanying the en:Department of Def...
    Public domain
  • Centrage sur le visage de Steven Spielberg
    Centrage sur le visage de Steven Spielberg
    Public domain
  • Director Steven Spielberg speaking at the Pentagon on August 11, 1999.
    Director Steven Spielberg speaking at the Pentagon on August 11, 1999.
    Public domain
  • Centrage sur le visage de Steven Spielberg
    Centrage sur le visage de Steven Spielberg
    Public domain
  • President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush stand with the Kennedy Center honorees in the Blue Room of the White House
    President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush stand with the Kennedy Center honorees in the Blue Room of the Wh...
    Public domain
  • President George W. Bush and Laura Bush attend the Kennedy Center Honors Gala at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Perf
    President George W. Bush and Laura Bush attend the Kennedy Center Honors Gala at the John F. Kennedy Center fo...
    Public domain
  • President Barack Obama delivers remarks before a screening of the HBO ten-part World War II miniseries "The Pacific" in
    President Barack Obama delivers remarks before a screening of the HBO ten-part World War II miniseries "The Pa...
    Public domain
  • Actor Tom Hanks, center, points to 250 veterans at the World War II Memorial March 11, during a speech by HBO co-preside
    Actor Tom Hanks, center, points to 250 veterans at the World War II Memorial March 11, during a speech by HBO ...
    Public domain
  • White House screening of The Pacific
    White House screening of The Pacific
    Public domain

Sources

Confidence. High: the main facts were confirmed in sources we opened.

Every link goes to the original source. Profile researched 2026-10-15.

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