Born January 14, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia, Steven (Andrew) Soderbergh was the second of six children of Mary Ann and Peter Soderbergh, a college professor and later dean of the College of Education at Louisiana State University. He became interested in filmmaking as a teenager and made experimental 8mm and 16mm films from the age of 15.

Soderbergh moved to Hollywood after graduating high school in the early 1980s. His first job was as a game show composer and cue card holder, after which he found work as a freelance film editor. He directed the concert video 9012Live for the rock band Yes in 1985, for which he received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Music Video, Long Form.

In 1989, at the age of 26, Soderbergh wrote and directed Sex, Lies, and Videotape which he submitted to the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Palme d’Or for Best Film. Released later that year in the U.S., it earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Also, in 1989, he married actress Betsy Brantley with whom he would have a daughter in 1990. They would divorce in 1994.

Soderbergh’s second film, 1991’s Kafka, was a notorious flop. His third and fourth films, 1993’s King of the Hill and 1995’s The Underneath, were well received by the critics but not by the public. It would take 1998’s Out of Sight and 1999’s The Limey to bring him back into the spotlight and 1990’s Erin Brockovich and Traffic to bring him back into awards contention. With those two films, he became the first director since Michael Curtiz in 1938 to be nominated for Best Director Oscars for two films in the same year, winning for Traffic.

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