Background and career
William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946) is an American filmmaker and author. An acclaimed director who tackled subjects ranging from the Vietnam War and American politics to musical biopics and crime dramas, Stone has received numerous accolades including three Academy Awards (plus ten career nominations), a BAFTA Award, a Primetime Emmy, a Satellite Award, a Sant Jordi Award, three Jupiter Awards, three Independent Spirit Awards, and six Golden Globe Awards. Stone was born in New York City and later briefly attended Yale University. In 1967, Stone enlisted in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. He served from 1967 to 1968 in the 25th Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions and was twice wounded in action. For his service, he received military honors including a Bronze Star with "V" Device for valor, Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster (to denote two wounds), an Air Medal and the Combat Infantryman Badge. His service in Vietnam became the foundation for the stark portrayals of war and its aftermath in his work. Stone began his career as a screenwriter for films such as Midnight Express (1978), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Scarface (1983). He then rose to prominence as writer and director of the Vietnam War film dramas Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), receiving Academy Awards for Best Director for both films, the former of which also won Best Picture. He also directed Salvador (1986), Wall Street (1987) and its sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), The Doors (1991), JFK (1991), Heaven & Earth (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994), Nixon (1995), Any Given Sunday (1999), W. (2008) and Snowden (2016). Collectively, his films have grossed $1.3 billion worldwide. Many of Stone's films focus on controversial American political issues during the late 20th century, and as such were considered contentious at the times of their releases. Stone has been critical of American foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by nationalist and imperialist agendas. Like his subject matter, Stone is a controversial figure in American filmmaking, with some critics accusing him of promoting conspiracy theories.
William Oliver Stone was born on September 15, 1946, at Doctors Hospital in Yorkville, Manhattan in New York City. He is the only child of Jacqueline (née Goddet) and Louis Stone (born Abraham Louis Silverstein). His parents met in his mother's hometown of Paris during World War II where his father, a U.S. Army colonel, served as a financial officer on General Eisenhower's staff. Upon his return to Manhattan after the war, Louis worked on Wall Street as a stockbroker and investment analyst, eventually becoming vice president of Shearson Lehman Brothers. Stone's paternal great-grandparents were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Poland. His grandfather, Joshua Silverstein, ran successful skirt-making businesses in New York City and New Jersey. The family changed its surname from Silverstein to Stone in the 1920s due to pervasive antisemitism in the United States. His aunt was author and editor Babette Rosmond; his cousins are writer Gene Stone and former chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission James Stone. Stone himself grew up in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. While his American father was Jewish, his French mother was Roman Catholic, though both were non-practicing. Stone was raised in the Episcopal Church and now practices Buddhism. Stone attended kindergarten through eighth grade at Trinity School in New York City before being sent to The Hill School, a college-preparatory boarding school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He spoke French as his first language, which led to some difficulties as an ESL learner during his early years at Trinity. His father paid him a quarter every week to write one to two pages on a theme; this inspired Stone's early love of writing. Starting at age nine, his primary caretaker was a male nanny, Karlo Stojanac. A Yugoslavian Holocaust survivor, Stojanac was both openly gay and a socialist, uncommon traits in that time period. Stone later described his nanny as having a fluctuating gender identity, as well as suffering post-traumatic stress from his experiences in a concentration camp. Reflecting on their bond, Stone described their relationship as "extraordinarily close", and said that Stojanac "was my mentor in many ways. He took care of me and he loved me." In 1962, while Stone was attending The Hill, his parents abruptly divorced, which shocked him. Following a court ruling that deemed his mother unfit, his father was granted sole custody. With his mother already frequently absent prior to the divorce, Stone was raised under the strong influence of his father, which may explain why father-son relationships are a recurring theme in his work. Stone often spent summers with his maternal grandparents in France, both in Paris and La Ferté-sous-Jouarre in Seine-et-Marne, where he was fascinated by his grandfather's stories of serving in the French Army during World War I. At 17, he worked as a runner in the Paris Commodities Exchange, a job that later proved inspirational for his film Wall Street. Because of the estrangement from his mother, his French grandmother was his primary maternal figure and her death in 1976 deeply affected him: "She loved me, and she’d always loved me and believed in me. That was a big thing. Something happened at [age] 30 with her death. And I became more mature, and my success started to flow from there.” After graduating from The Hill School in 1964, Stone was admitted to Yale University, but left in June 1965 at age 18 to teach high school students English for six months at the Free Pacific Institute in Saigon, South Vietnam. Afterwards, he worked for a short while as a wiper on a United States Merchant Marine ship in 1966, traveling from Asia to the US across the rough Pacific Ocean in January. He returned to Yale, but dropped out again after one semester (in part due to working on an autobiographical novel A Child's Night Dream, published in 1997 by St. Martin's Press). During this period, Stone also battled severe depression and suicidal ideation. He would continue to have episodes of major depression throughout his life: “I was lost for a long time, and I stayed lost."
In April 1967, Stone enlisted in the United States Army and requested combat duty in Vietnam. Upon arrival, he first served (from September 27, 1967 – February 23, 1968) as a infantryman with 2nd Platoon, B Company, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division. In October 1967, he was medevaced for the first time after being shot in the neck during a night ambush, a wound which nearly severed his jugular vein and carotid artery. "It was a miracle I survived the neck injury," he reflected in 2025. Later, while fighting with that same unit in the New Year's Battle of 1968, Stone was knocked unconscious and had his eardrum perforated by the concussive blast of a beehive round, which resulted in permanent deafness in that ear. (As he did not leave duty or receive medical treatment, this injury did not qualify for a Purple Heart. As a result, Stone often refers to himself as "twice wounded," referencing only the injuries for which he was hospitalized and received Purple Hearts). On January 15, 1968, Stone was wounded and evacuated from the 25th Infantry Division for the final time when, while attempting to aid other injured personnel, a satchel charge implanted in a tree detonated, causing a blast concussion and shrapnel wounds to his legs and buttocks. In the 1990s, biographer James Riordan discovered correspondence from the Treasury Department of the American Consulate in Hong Kong dated 1968, revealing that Louis Stone had used his government connections to request a noncombat transfer for his son following his injuries. However, the letter stated that Oliver emphatically declined the offered support position with the CIA and emphasized his commitment to his military service. Following a month-long hospital stay, Stone briefly served transitional duty as a military policeman in Saigon. He was then transferred to the 1st Cavalry Division, participating in long-range reconnaissance patrols, before being transferred to Troop D, 1st Squadron of the 9th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cav for the rest of his tour. While serving with that unit on August 21, 1968, Stone charged and killed a North Vietnamese sniper who had several squads pinned down during a crossfire firefight near My Khe beach (nicknamed "China Beach" by the U.S.). For that action, he was awarded the Bronze Star with "V" Device for "heroism in ground combat." Following a voluntary three-month extension of his tour, Stone was separated from active duty on November 15, 1968, and (after five years of Individual Ready Reserve status) officially discharged from the Army on April 1, 1973, at the rank of Specialist 4. In addition to the Bronze Star, his military awards include the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster to denote two awards, the Air Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, Sharpshooter Badge with Rifle Bar, Marksman Badge with Auto Rifle Bar, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal with one Silver Service Star, the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross with Unit Citation with Palm, two Overseas Service Bars, the Vietnam Campaign Medal and the Combat Infantryman Badge.
On June 30, 1969, the French news program Voila interviewed a then-unknown Stone while filming "on the street" interviews about the war in Central Park. In fluent French, he told them, "My name is Oliver Stone, I’m 22 years old, I’m from New York, and my mother is French from Paris. I served in Vietnam with the American Army for 15 months and I returned to the United States six months ago. It changed me. It changes a lot of boys." He added that drug use was rampant among American soldiers. Following the war, Stone suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. His PTSD was compounded by a violent mugging he experienced in the East Village in the summer of 1969, during which he sustained defensive knife wounds. Stone has also described long-term physical complications from his military service, specifically combat induced hearing loss and tinnitus, minor discomfort from shrapnel still embedded in his body, and fertility issues he believes were caused by Agent Orange exposure. He commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War's conclusion by sharing his reflections during panel discussions at the Harvard Institute of Politics and San Diego State University's Center for War and Society and in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Stone denied experiencing any hostility upon returning from Vietnam. Instead, he characterized the general attitude to veterans as indifferent, which contributed to his feelings of depression and isolation. In a 2020 BBC interview, he reflected that, despite his later success, he felt his experience as a combat veteran alienated him from both his generation and Hollywood.
Stone attended New York University on the G.I. Bill, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film in 1971, where his teachers included director and fellow NYU alumnus Martin Scorsese and where he had a small acting role in the comedy The Battle of Love's Return. In Scorsese's class, Stone made a short, well received 12-minute film about a disabled veteran, Last Year in Viet Nam. He later worked varied jobs as a taxi driver, PBS production assistant, messenger, and salesman before making his mark as a screenwriter. In 1979, Stone was awarded his first Oscar, after adapting true-life prison story Midnight Express into the successful film of the same name for British director Alan Parker (the two men would later collaborate on the 1996 movie of stage musical Evita). The original author and subject of the film, Billy Hayes, said the film's depiction of prison conditions was accurate and that the "message of Midnight Express isn't, 'Don't go to Turkey. It's, 'Don't be an idiot like I was, and try to smuggle drugs.' " Stone later apologized to Turkey for over-dramatizing the script, while standing by the film's stark depiction of the brutality of Turkish prisons.
After his breakthrough, Stone continued his successful career as a screenwriter, most notably Brian De Palma's drug lord epic Scarface, loosely inspired by his own addiction to cocaine, which he successfully kicked while working on the screenplay. He also penned Year of the Dragon (co-written with Michael Cimino) featuring Mickey Rourke, before his career took off as a writer-director in 1986. Like his contemporary Michael Mann, Stone is unusual in having written or co-written most of the films he has directed. In 1986, Stone directed two films back to back: the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful Salvador, shot largely in Mexico, and his long in-development Vietnam project Platoon, shot in the Philippines. Platoon brought Stone's name to a much wider audience. It also kick-started a busy directing career which saw him direct nine films over the next decade. Platoon won rave reviews (Roger Ebert named it the best film of 1986 and later called it the ninth best film of the decade), massive commercial success, and Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2007, a film industry vote ranked it at number 83 in an American Film Institute "AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies" poll of the previous century's best American movies. British TV channel Channel 4 voted Platoon as the sixth greatest war film ever made. In 2019, Platoon was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." While Platoon was about Stone's own experience in combat, he followed it with two other films showing different perspectives of the Vietnam War. In 1989, he co-wrote and directed Born on the Fourth of July, based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic, a Marine who became an anti-war activist after being paralyzed in combat. The film was a critical success and received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and earned Stone his second Best Director Oscar. At the 47th Golden Globes, Stone became the first filmmaker to win Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture (as producer) for the same film (the only other filmmaker to achieve the same feat is Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another). It was also a commercial success, grossing $161 million against a budget of just $17.8 million to become the tenth highest-grossing film of that year. Heaven & Earth (1993) was the final film in his unofficial Vietnam trilogy, written and directed by Stone based on the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese woman whose life was drastically changed by the war and its aftermath. Immediately following the success of Platoon, Stone co-wrote and directed another hit, 1987's Wall Street, starring Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas, who received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko. After Wall Street, Stone co-wrote and directed Talk Radio, based on Eric Bogosian's Pulitzer-nominated play. The film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Stone his third Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Director.
