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Barry Levinson
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Barry Levinson (born April 6, 1942 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American screenwriter, film director, actor, and producer of film and television.
After growing up in Baltimore, he attended American University in Washington, D.C. before moving to Los Angeles to work as an actor and writer. His first writing work was for variety shows such as The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, The Lohman and Barkley Show, The Tim Conway Show, and The Carol Burnett Show.
After some success as a screenwriter (
Silent Movie, 1976,
High Anxiety, 1977,
...And Justice for All, 1979), he began his career as a director with
Diner (1982), for which he had also written the script and which earned him a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination.
Diner was the first of a series of films set in the
Baltimore of Levinson's youth. The other films in this series were
Tin Men (1987), starring
Richard Dreyfuss and
Danny DeVito, and the turn-of-the-century immigrant family saga
Avalon (which featured
Elijah Wood in one of his earliest screen appearances), as well as the more recent
Liberty Heights (1999). All four movies were written and directed by Barry Levinson himself; for the last two he also acted as producer.
His biggest hit, both critically and financially, was Rain Man (1988) with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise (in which he also appeared as an antagonistic doctor). The film won four Academy Awards including Best Director for Levinson. Other notable films in his directing career were The Natural (1984), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Toys (1992), both with Robin Williams, and Bugsy (1991) with Warren Beatty.
He directed Dustin Hoffman again in Wag the Dog (1997), a political comedy about a war staged in a film studio. He was also an uncredited co-writer on Dustin Hoffman's transvestite comedy Tootsie (1982).
Barry partnered with producer Mark Johnson to form the film production company Baltimore Pictures, until the duo parted ways in 1994.
Apart from producing many of his own films, he has also been producer or
executive producer for such major productions as
The Perfect Storm (directed by
Wolfgang Petersen, 2000),
Analyze That (2002, starring
Robert de Niro as neurotic mafia boss and
Billy Crystal as his therapist), and
Possession (2002, based on the bestselling novel by
A. S. Byatt). He also has a television production company with
Tom Fontana (The Levinson/Fontana Company) and served as executive producer for a number of their series, including
Homicide: Life on the Street (which ran on
NBC from 1993-1999) and the
HBO prison drama
Oz. Levinson also played a main role in the short-lived TV series
The Jury, where he played a judge (the role was uncredited).
Levinson published his first novel, Sixty-Six (ISBN 0-7679-1533-X), in 2003. Like several of his films, it is semi-autobiographical and set in Baltimore in the early 1960s.
Levinson also directed the two webisodes of the American Express ads "The Adventures of Seinfeld and Superman."
Levinson married his writing collaborator Valerie Curtin in 1975. They would divorce seven years later. He later married Dianna Rhodes whom he met in Baltimore while filming Diner.
Levinson is a minority owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team.
