Oliver Stone was born on September 15, 1946, in New York City, to a Jewish father and French Roman Catholic mother. Raised an Episcopalian from some sense of compromise, his parents divorced while he was a teenager. Devastated by the family split, it was only then that he learned of his father’s many extramarital affairs.
Oliver attended several schools, notably New York University and Yale University, but dropped out after one year. He returned to Yale after teaching English at the Free Pacific Institute in South Vietnam and working six months in the merchant marine, but he dropped out again before completing his studies. While at New York University, he studied under veteran filmmaker, Martin Scorsese.
Stone served with United States Army from April 1967 to November of 1968, requesting combat duty. He was wounded twice in action and earned a Bronze Star for valor and a Purple Heart. He has made three films about the Vietnam conflict, “Platoon” (1986), “Born On The Fourth of July” (1989) and “Heaven and Earth” (1993). His directorial debut was in 1974 with the obscure horror film, “Seizure,” and his first Academy Award was for “Midnight Express”, based on the book by Billy Hayes. During his film career, he has won three Academy Awards.
His films are usually highly political and critical of government, and his hallmark is the use of many different cameras and film formats, sometimes using diverse formats in a single scene. This is most aptly pronounced in “JFK” (1991) and “Natural Born Killers” (1994). Surrounded by controversy in his personal life as well as in his films, Stone has been rumored to use drugs while making films, a fact that is somewhat supported by his arrest in 1999 and his plea of guilty and no contest to driving under the influence. Ordered into a rehab program, he was arrested again in Los Angeles in 2005 for a small amount of marijuana possession.
Oliver Stone has been married twice and has two children. He continues to produce thought-provoking and controversial films, the next scheduled for release late in 2006, is “World Trade Center” for Paramount Pictures, which tells the story not from the point of view of the attack per se, but rather on a deeply personal level as it involves the lives of two affected families.
What are some of YOUR favorite Oliver Stone films? Please share your thoughts.
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