Background
John Stillman was born on January 25, 1952 in New York, United States, in the family of Margaret Drinker (Riley), from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a Democratic politician, John Sterling Stillman, an assistant secretary of commerce under President John F. Kennedy, from Washington, DC. His great-grandfather was businessman James Stillman and his great-great-grandfather, Charles Stillman, was the founder of Brownsville, Texas. Stillman grew up in Cornwall, New York and experienced depression during puberty. Stillman's godfather was academic E. Digby Baltzell.
Education
John attended the Collegiate School, Potomac School and Millbrook School, and then studied history at Harvard University.
Career
After graduating from Harvard in 1973, Stillman began working as an editorial assistant at Doubleday in New York City, followed by a stint as a junior editor at The American Spectator.
John was introduced to some film producers from Madrid and persuaded them that he could sell their films to Spanish-language television in the United States. He worked for the next few years in Barcelona and Madrid as a sales agent for directors Fernando Trueba and Fernando Colomo, and sometimes acted in their films, usually playing comic Americans, such as his role in Trueba's film, "Sal Gorda."
Stillman wrote and directed three comedies of manners released in the 1990s: "Metropolitan", "Barcelona", and "The Last Days of Disco"; he published a novel based on the last of these films. A fourth film, "Damsels in Distress", was released in 2011, premiering out of competition as the closing film at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.
