David Owen Russell (born August 20, 1958) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. His early directing career includes the comedy films Spanking the Monkey (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), Three Kings (1999), and I Love Huckabees (2004). Three of Russell's more recent films – the biographical sports drama The Fighter (2010), the romantic comedy-drama Silver Linings Playbook (2012), and the comedy-drama crime film American Hustle (2013) – were commercially successful and acclaimed by critics, having earned Russell three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, as well as a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Silver Linings Playbook and a Best Original Screenplay nomination for American Hustle. Russell received his seventh Golden Globe nomination for the semi-biographical comedy-drama Joy (2015). Russell was born in Manhattan, to Maria (née Muzio) and Bernard (Markovski) Russell. His parents worked for Simon & Schuster; his father was the vice president of sales for the company and his mother was a secretary there. His father was from a Russian Jewish family and his mother was Italian American (of Lucanian descent). Russell's maternal grandparents were Frank Muzio, born in Craco, and Philomena Brancata, born in Ferrandina, both in the province of Matera. His paternal grandfather, a butcher from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, lost many of his relatives in concentration camps. Russell was raised in Larchmont, New York, in an atheist, middle-class household. When he was 13, he made his first film for a school project and used a Super 8 film camera to film people in New York City. He attended Mamaroneck High School, where he was voted "Class Rebel". He fell in love with film in his teens (his favorite movies included Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and Shampoo) but aspired to become a writer; Russell started a newspaper in high school and wrote short stories. His parents worked for a publishing company, so he grew up in a household filled with books and novels. Russell received his A.B. degree from Amherst College, where he majored in English and political science, in 1981. He wrote his senior thesis on the United States intervention in Chile from 1963 to 1973.

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