Barry Levinson (born April 6, 1942) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Levinson won the Academy Award for Best Director for Rain Man (1988). His other best-known works are Diner (1982), The Natural (1984), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Bugsy (1991), and Wag the Dog (1997). In 2021, he co-executive produced the Hulu miniseries Dopesick and directed the first two episodes.
Early life
Levinson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Violet "Vi" (née Krichinsky) and Irvin Levinson, who worked in the furniture and appliance business. He is of Russian-Jewish descent. After growing up in Forest Park, Baltimore and graduating from Forest Park Senior High School in 1960, Levinson studied broadcast journalism at Baltimore Junior College and American University in Washington, D.C. He later moved to Los Angeles to work as an actor and writer and performed comedy routines. Levinson at one time shared an apartment with would-be drug smuggler (and subject of the movie Blow) George Jung.
Career
Levinson's first writing work was for television variety shows such as The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, The Lohman and Barkley Show, The Tim Conway Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. He moved on to success as a film screenwriter – notably the Mel Brooks comedies Silent Movie (1976) and High Anxiety (1977) (in which he played a bellboy) and the Oscar-nominated script (co-written by Valerie Curtin) for ...And Justice for All (1979). He was an uncredited co-writer on Dustin Hoffman's 1982 hit comedy Tootsie.
Levinson began his career as a film director with Diner (1982), for which he also wrote the script, earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Diner was the first of four films set in the Baltimore of Levinson's youth. The other three were Tin Men (1987), a story of aluminum-siding salesmen in the 1960s starring Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito; the immigrant family saga Avalon (1990) featuring Elijah Wood in one of his earliest screen appearances; and Liberty Heights (1999).
His biggest hit, both critically and financially, was Rain Man (1988), a sibling drama starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in which Levinson appeared as a doctor in a cameo appearance. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It also won the Golden Bear at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival.
