Schreiber was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Heather (née Milgram) and Tell Schreiber, a stage actor and director. His father is of Austrian, Irish, Swiss and Scottish descent, and his mother is Jewish, the descendant of immigrants from Poland, Ukraine and Germany. His mother says she named him after her favorite author, Leo Tolstoy, while his father claims that Schreiber was named after the doctor who saved his mother's life. His family nickname, adopted when Schreiber was a baby, is 'Huggy'.[4] When Schreiber was one year old, his family moved to Canada, but at age five, due to his parents' divorce, he moved to New York City with his mother, where he grew up on the Lower East Side.
His mother was 'a highly cultured eccentric' who supported them by splitting her time between driving a cab and creating papier-mâché puppets.' On Schreiber's 16th birthday, his mother bought him a motorcycle, 'to promote fearlessness'.The critic John Lahr wrote in a 1999 New Yorker profile that, 'To a large extent, Schreiber's professional shape-shifting and his uncanny instinct for isolating the frightened, frail, goofy parts of his characters are a result of being forced to adapt to his mother's eccentricities. It's both his grief and his gift.'Schreiber's mother also forbade Schreiber from seeing color movies. As a result, his favorite actor was Charlie Chaplin. In the late 70s and early 80s Schreiber, known then as Shiva Das, lived at the Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville East, in Pomfret, Connecticut. He also abided by his mother's vegetarian diet. In retrospect, Schreiber said in a 2008 interview, he appreciates his mother's influences, saying, 'Since I've had Sasha, I've completely identified with everything my mother went through raising me...And I think her choices were inspired.Subsequently, Schreiber attended Friends Seminary, the same school attended by actress Amanda Peet when he was a senior and she was in sixth grade. Though athletic, he was unpopular and isolated in school, partially due to his bizarre home life and admitted incidents of stealing.
Schreiber went on to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where he began his acting training and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, via the Five Colleges consortium. He graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 1992, where he starred in Charles Evered's The Size of the World, directed by Walton Jones. At Yale, Liev studied with Earle R. Gister. He also attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He originally wanted to be a screenwriter, but was steered toward acting instead.
Schreiber had several supporting roles in various independent films until his big break, as the accused murderer Cotton Weary in the Scream trilogy of horror films. Though the success of the Scream trilogy would lead Schreiber to roles in several big-budget studio pictures, Entertainment Weekly wrote in 2007 that 'Schreiber is [still] best known for such indie gems as Walking and Talking, The Daytrippers, and Big Night.
After Scream, Schreiber was cast as the young Orson Welles in the HBO original movie RKO 281, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award. He then played supporting roles in several studio films, including the 2000 movie of Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, The Hurricane with Denzel Washington, and The Sum of All Fears with Ben Affleck. The 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Washington and Meryl Streep, was another major film for the actor, stirring some controversy as it opened during a heated presidential election cycle. Schreiber also played as Robert Thorn with Julia Stiles in 'The Omen (2006 film)' An American ambassador who learns to his horror that his son is actually the literal Antichrist, a remake of the 1976 horror classic 'The Omen' (1976).
Along with his screen work, Schreiber is a well-respected classical actor; in a 1998 review of the Shakespeare play Cymbeline, The New York Times called his performance 'revelatory' and ended the article with the plea, 'More Shakespeare, Mr. Schreiber.' A year later, Schreiber played the title role in Hamlet in a December 1999 revival at The Public Theater, to similar raves. In 2000, he played Laertes in Hamlet, a modern adaptation of the play. His performance in the title role of Henry V in a 2003 Central Park production of that play caused Lahr to expound upon his aptitude at playing Shakespeare. 'He has a swiftness of mind,' Lahr wrote, 'which convinces the audience that language is being coined in the moment. His speech, unlike that of the merely adequate supporting cast, feels lived rather than learned.'
In 2002 he starred in Neil LaBute's play The Mercy Seat along with Sigourney Weaver on Broadway that was critically and commercially very successful. In the spring of 2005, Schreiber essayed a non-Shakespearean stage role, that of Richard Roma in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross. As Roma, Schreiber won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play. In June to July 2006, he played the title role in Macbeth opposite Jennifer Ehle at the Delacorte Theater.
Schreiber has a half sister and four half brothers, one of whom, Pablo, is also an actor. The other half-brothers are Max, Charles, and Will. He has a Jack Russell pup named Chicken (born in the spring of 2000). He is a good friend of Dustin Hoffman. He enjoys basketball, fencing, cycling, and has played football in the past. He has previously dated Kristin Davis, and Kate Driver, sister of Minnie Driver. Although there were rumors that they had married, Schreiber is dating British-Australian actress Naomi Watts (with whom he appeared in The Painted Veil). Their first son Alexander Pete was born on July 25, 2007. They call him Sasha, a Russian variation of the name Alexander. On December 13, 2008, Watts gave birth to the couple's second son, Samuel Kai
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