Oliver Stone(1946–)

William Oliver Stone was born at New York City on the fifteenth of September 1946, only child of Louis Stone, a New York Stock Exchange senior partner and investment advisor of French-Jewish New York stock, and Jacqueline Goddet, a French-Catholic émigré from Paris. He was raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side and at the family country house at Stamford, Connecticut, was schooled at the Trinity School in Manhattan and at the Hill School at Pottstown in Pennsylvania, entered Yale University in September 1964 in his eighteenth year, and dropped out after his first year to take a Teaching Assistant's place at the Free Pacific Institute Chinese-language secondary school at Cho Lon outside Saigon, South Vietnam.

He returned to Yale in 1966, dropped out again the same year, enlisted in the United States Army in April 1967, and served from September 1967 to November 1968 with the 25th Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Division in the central highlands and the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam. He was awarded the Bronze Star with Valor for action at Firebase Burt on the New Year's Day battle of 1968, was wounded twice, and was discharged in November 1968 with the rank of Specialist 4th Class and with the personal experience of the Vietnam War that became the central single material of his later film work. He took the BFA at New York University Film School in 1971 under the head of department Martin Scorsese, and across the early 1970s wrote screenplays in Los Angeles and worked at small directing-and-writing assignments.

He won his first Academy Award for screenwriting Alan Parker's Midnight Express (1978, the adaptation of Billy Hayes's account of his Turkish prison experience), continued at screenwriting work through Conan the Barbarian (1982), Scarface (1983, for Brian De Palma, the Tony Montana Cuban-American drug-empire feature), Year of the Dragon (1985, for Michael Cimino), and his own first directing of Salvador (1986, on the Salvadoran civil war). His central single career-establishing film was Platoon (1986, the Vietnam-platoon-experience film he had been writing in various drafts since 1971), which he wrote and directed; the film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director (the first Vietnam-veteran director ever to win the Best Director Academy Award), grossed one hundred and thirty-eight million dollars worldwide on a six-million-dollar budget, and is on every modern list of the central war films of the late twentieth century.

He directed across the next decade the body of historical-and-political films on which his world reputation primarily rests: Wall Street (1987, the Michael Douglas Gordon Gekko greed is good speech), Born on the Fourth of July (1989, the second Best Director Academy Award, the adaptation of Ron Kovic's Vietnam-veteran memoir starring Tom Cruise), The Doors (1991), JFK (1991, the speculative-historical Kennedy assassination film starring Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison; three-hour-and-eight-minute film, eight Academy Award nominations, won two), Heaven and Earth (1993, completing the Vietnam trilogy), Natural Born Killers (1994), Nixon (1995, Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon, four Academy Award nominations), and U Turn (1997). He continued through the 2000s and 2010s with Alexander (2004), W. (2008, George W. Bush biopic), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Snowden (2016), and the documentary work on Castro (2003), Hugo Chávez (2009), and the four-part Putin Interviews (2017). The Stone name in modern American cinema carries the weight of the Vietnam trilogy and the three Academy Awards.