The Spielberg siblings have shared a close bond since childhood
Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, recounted his beginnings as a filmmaker while examining how his family shaped his journey. An important part of that story is his relationship with his three younger sisters: Anne, Sue and Nancy.
The siblings have always had a strong bond, whether they were supporting each other through the divorce of their parents, Leah and Arnold, working together on one of Steven’s early film projects when they lived in Phoenix, or joyfully singing and dancing to the timeless tunes of Motown.
In an interview with TIME, Steven spoke about his sisters’ reactions to how their family’s story was depicted in The Fabelmans.
“The kids were just falling apart. Because it brought Dad and Mom back to them in a way that was painful but also liberating.” He added, “We’ve always been close, but this story brought us back together again as if we were all back in Phoenix.”
When Steven accepted the Golden Globe award for best director in 2023, he said, “There’s five people happier than I am. There’s my sister Anne, my sister Sue, my sister Nancy, my dad Arnold and my mom.”
From the close ties with their brother to seeing their family brought to life on-screen, here’s everything to know about Steven Spielberg’s close relationship with his sisters, Anne, Sue and Nancy.
Filmmaking is a family business
Steven is an Academy Award-winning producer and director, but he isn’t the only filmmaker in the Spielberg family.
Anne is a screenwriter and producer who worked for her brother’s company, Amblin Entertainment, before co-writing and co-producing the movie Big. She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay alongside her Big co-writer, Gary Ross.
Nancy is a documentary film producer who studied cinema at Sarah Lawrence College and the New School and worked on some of Steven’s early films. “I actually wanted to be a writer at first, but I grew up in a family immersed in film and storytelling,” she said in a 2018 interview with the Montreal Gazette. “I was also being told to take my stories down a notch. So it was probably that kind of osmosis that led me into this business.”
After writing and consulting on film projects, Nancy became a producer with the 2014 documentary, Above and Beyond. She is the head of Playmount Productions, the company her father, Arnold, started in 1962.
Nancy has also talked about becoming a producer in her 50s. “Never too old to start. I decided to jump into the icy deep end, but I was really scared. I was intimidated by the other Spielbergs in the room.”
Steven enjoyed scaring his sisters
In a 1982 interview with The Washington Post, Sue talked about how Steven’s creative way of tormenting his sisters shaped his career and inspired some of his biggest films.
“Steven used to try to scare Nancy and me with horror stories or stunts that were very similar to the kinds of things you see in Poltergeist. The scene where the man hallucinates his face decomposing is one I’ll never forget. He tried that out on us when we were kids. He took a batch of dampened, colored toilet paper and plastered it on his face. Then he crept into our bedroom and began peeling the stuff off in layers. Yuck!” she recalled.
Nancy has also talked about Steven’s scare tactics. In an interview with the Wilmington Star-News, she said, “He was always making movies. If I didn’t help him with his movies, he’d lock me in a closet with his skull.” She added, “He could scare us silly with his storytelling.”
Steven kept a huge secret from his sisters for decades
It wasn’t until The Fabelmans that Anne, Sue and Nancy learned that Steven had kept a huge secret from them about their mother, Leah. While putting footage together from family camping trips, 16-year-old Steven discovered that his mother had fallen in love with his father’s best friend, Bernie.
“I was convinced that what I found was going to be explained to me in an innocent way and I would feel relieved and forever foolish for confronting her,” Steven shared in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I showed her the film in the closet and she started to tear up and then she burst into tears and fell to the floor sobbing. My life ended in that moment. Everything stopped. It was a freeze frame.“
Each sister reacted to learning this fact about the past from their brother. “It really hit me with such sadness that you couldn’t share that until now. I felt so heartbroken,” Sue said. Anne added, “It was a shock reading about that. It was like a slap in the face.”
“I’m the baby, and when I was born there were always three adult faces looking down at me when I was in a crib, so I didn’t know my life without Bernie. He was a fixture. And we had no idea. He was our friend. That was a shock,” Nancy said. “But also I felt so bad that you had to hold that all those years.”
The family owns a restaurant in Los Angeles
In addition to being a musician and artist, Leah was known for her West L.A. restaurant, The Milky Way, which she opened in 1977 alongside her second husband, Bernie Adler. After Leah died in 2017, her children took over the beloved kosher eatery.
Nancy spoke about her family’s connection to the restaurant in LAist ahead of its reopening in 2019. “If we wanted to be with her, we would hang out in the restaurant, sit at her corner table to share our joys and our woes, hear her sage yet unusual advice and just be in her presence. The Milky Way meant the world to our mom.” She added, “Home is where your mom is. The Milky Way was our home in many ways.”
Tornadoes have been a recurring theme in their lives
There’s a pivotal scene in The Fabelmans where Mitzi (Michelle Williams) — inspired by Spielberg matriarch, Leah — gets in the car with her children and drives toward a tornado.
While Steven never confirmed whether that was based on an actual story from his youth, tornadoes are a recurring theme for the Spielbergs.
“He had a game called Tornado,” Nancy shared in an interview with the Wilmington Star-News. “My girlfriends and I would be in my room, playing with our Barbies, and Steven would rush in, and he’d do a voice just like the radio: ‘There’s a tornado heading this way!’ Then we all had to go in the tornado shelter, and we’d get blown around, and if Steve touched us, we’d be turned to stone.”
Steven served as an executive producer for the hit movie Twister in 1996, which follows a group of storm chasers working to develop a cutting-edge weather warning system.
The siblings collaborated on bringing their family’s story to the screen
Steven made sure to include his sisters in the production of The Fabelmans by staying connected through Zoom calls and emails, ensuring that every aspect was accurate when recreating their childhood home in Phoenix. Anne, Sue and Nancy advised on wardrobe, furniture, food and more.
Nancy spoke about that experience in an interview with The Times. “We were very involved. Every painting you see on the walls is a painting that hung in our home.”
The sisters also visited the set of the film during production. Julia Butters, who played Reggie — the character inspired by Anne in The Fabelmans — spoke about meeting the Spielberg sibling while filming. “She came to set for a big family scene and she just hugged me for almost a minute straight,” Butters told Variety. “She’s such an elegant woman. I’m so incredibly grateful that I got to represent her.”
“This film is, for me, a way of bringing my mom and dad back. And it also brought my sisters, Annie, Susie, and Nancy, closer to me than I ever thought possible,” Steven said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “And that was worth making the film.”
Source people.com
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