Nationality American Name Samuel Bernstein | Role Screenwriter Spouse Ronald Shore (m. 1994) | |
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Movies Bobbie's Girl, Silent Lies Books Lulu, Kill Your Inner Child Awards Stonewall Book Awards - Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award Similar People Jeremy Kagan, Bernadette Peters, Josh Silver, John Davis, Howard W Koch | ||
Samuel Garza Bernstein is an award winning screenwriter, director and author (born 1970) who grew up all over the world, living in Cairo, Honolulu, Austin, Phoenix, Albuquerque, New York City, Los Angeles, and Ft. Collins, Colorado, while his family also traveled through Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. The dramatic events of his emotionally volatile upbringing are explored in "Kill Your Inner Child," his multimedia memoir from the Hearst Corporation and the television show of the same title.
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Biography
Bernstein dove into show business immediately upon graduating high school in Texas, moving to New York at the age of 17. After studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts he began to work as an actor and singer, most notably playing the role of “Magaldi” in various productions of Evita. In the early 90s he started writing, and his first play, “The Liquidation of Granny Peterman,” was produced in Hollywood. The Los Angeles Times said, "Samuel Bernstein's insights into what keeps families together are as rich as a holiday pudding."
While writing and rewriting the script that would become his first film, “Silent Lies,” he worked on his first book, a photo-anthology called “Uncommon Heroes” that won a Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association in 1996. Bernstein and his partner on the project, Phillip Sherman, tied with writer Dorothy Allison. His book about the rise and fall of Confidential (magazine) in the 1950s, "Mr. Confidential" was published by Walford Press in 2007 and Liz Smith proclaimed that, "It reads like a house afire in a sultry swamp!". He adapted the project with composer David Snyder as a stage musical that premiered in 2014 at the New York Musical Theatre Festival.
Silent Lies, a dark, violent film about incest, opened at The Montreal World Film Festival in 1996. Though press materials for the film said otherwise, Bernstein was often referred to in newspaper articles about the movie as an “incest survivor“ which with his typical sense of black humor, he started finding strangely funny.
Among his many other film and television projects, his favorite is Bobbie's Girl which starred Bernadette Peters, Rachel Ward, and Jonathan Silverman, and marked the film debut of Thomas Sangster, the young actor who would go on to star in Love, Actually and Nanny McPhee among his many other films. Bernadette Peters received an Emmy nomination while the film received a Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation nomination and a citation from The Advocate as one of the top ten television events of the year.
He and husband Ronald Shore have been together since 1994 and were married in Vancouver when same-sex marriage became legal there in 2003.