Steven Spielberg (born 1946) was one of the wealthiest and most powerful movie-makers in Hollywood. The director of such elaborate fantasies as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial, he was regarded as a man who understood the pulse of America as it would like to see itself.

Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on December 18, 1946. He was the oldest of four children. His father, Arnold, was an electrical engineer who worked in what was then a newly emerging field: computers. His mother, Leah, had been a concert pianist. The only boy among his siblings, he was doted on by his mother and three sisters; therefore, it is not surprising that he grew up having his own way and feeling that he was the center of the universe. Indulged throughout his childhood at home, he was not so treated at school where he displayed...