David O. Russell

David Owen Russell (born August 20, 1958) is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. His early directing career includes the comedy films Spanking the Monkey (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), Three Kings (1999), and I Heart Huckabees (2004). He gained critical success with the biographical sports drama The Fighter (2010), the romantic comedy-drama Silver Linings Playbook (2012), and the dark comedy crime film American Hustle (2013). The three films were commercially successful and acclaimed by critics, earning Russell three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, as well as a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Silver Linings Playbook and a Best Original Screenplay nomination for American Hustle. Russell received his seventh Golden Globe nomination for the semi-biographical comedy-drama Joy (2015). Early life Russell was raised in Larchmont, New York, in an atheist, middle-class household. His parents worked for Simon & Schuster; his father, Bernard, was the vice president of sales for the company, and his mother, Maria, was a secretary there. His father was from a Russian-Jewish family, and his mother was Italian-American (of Lucanian descent). His paternal grandfather, a butcher from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, lost many of his relatives in concentration camps. When he was 13, Russell made his first film for a school project and used a Super 8 film camera to film people in New York City. He attended Mamaroneck High School, where he was voted "Class Rebel". He fell in love with film in his teens (his favorite movies included Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and Shampoo) but aspired to become a writer; Russell started a newspaper in high school and wrote short stories. As his parents worked in the publishing industry, he grew up in a household filled with books. In 1981, Russell received his A.B. degree from Amherst College, where he majored in English and political science. He wrote his senior thesis on the United States intervention in Chile from 1963 to 1973.