Background
Ethnicity:
Liev Schreiber’s mother is Jewish (of Polish Jewish and Russian Jewish descent). Liev’s father’s ancestry includes German (the origin of his surname), Swiss-German, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Norwegian, Belgian (Flemish), Scottish, and Welsh.
Liev Schreiber was born on October 4, 1967, in San Francisco, California, the United States. His mother Heather Milgram is Jewish and has good knowledge of classical music and Russian literature. His father, Tell Carroll Schreiber, comes from a wealthy Protestant family. He is a stage actor and director. Liev has half-brothers from his mother’s first marriage. Actor Pablo Schreiber is his half-brother from his father’s side.
At the beginning of his parents’ marriage in San Francisco, his mother was heavily dependent on LSD, and was repeatedly hospitalized and also underwent therapy. When he was a toddler, his family moved to Canada.
When his father threatened to admit his mother to a mental hospital for her LSD problems, she left him and took Liev with her. However, with the help of private detectives, his father could track them down. When Liev was three, his father even kidnapped him from a place in New York, where Heather stayed. When Liev was four, he was still with his mother, living in a dilapidated building in New York City. Later, his parents got entangled in a custody battle over him, and his maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram, became bankrupt fighting the custody battle.
His parents divorced when Liev was five, and his mother won his custody. They moved into a cheap apartment in Manhattan, and he was enrolled in Joffrey Ballet School of New York. He was raised in poverty, sleeping on the floor with no electricity and no hot water in the apartment.
Things were hard for them, and they spent time living in squats in abandoned buildings, and an apartment without electricity, while Heather looked for work to support them. During this time, his mother taught him to read and forbid him from seeing movies in color, which left Liev to see old black and white and silent films at a local revival house. He particularly enjoyed those by Charlie Chaplin. The first color movie he saw was Star Wars in 1977.
His mother earned a living by driving a cab and making papier-mâché puppets. At times, he had to endure his mother's eccentricities and bohemian bent of mind. She even forced him to go to an ashram school when he was 12 and made him wear yoga shirts. In the late 1970s, Liev, who was then called Shiva Das, lived at the Satchidananda Ashram in Connecticut and was on a vegetarian diet. In retrospect, Schreiber said in a 2008 interview that 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."
