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Stephen Roark Gyllenhaal (pronounced "JILL-en-hall"), born October 4, 1949 in Cleveland, Ohio, is an American film and television director and member of the Gyllenhaal family.

He is the second husband of screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, father of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal, and brother of Anders Gyllenhaal http://www.pulitzer.org/CurrentBoard/gyllenhaalbio.html, managing editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune since 2002.

On October 3, 2006, just a day before his own birthday, Stephen became a grandfather for the first time when Maggie and her fiance, actor Peter Sarsgaard, became proud parents of baby Ramona Gyllenhaal Sarsgaard who was born in New York City.

The family are descendants of the aristocratic Gyllenhaal family, which was ennobled in 1652 when Queen Christina of Sweden conferred on cavalry officer Nils Gunnesson Haal a title, crest, and the name Gyllenhaal http://www.gyllenhaal.org (loosely translated as "golden-hall"). Gyllenhaal's Swedish ancestry is distant, as his last Swedish ancestor was his great-grandfather, Anders Leonard Gyllenhaal.http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=arc150&id=I098841

He grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a close-knit Swedenborgian family and attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut with a degree in English. His mentor at Trinity was the poet Hugh Odgen.

As well as being a director of fine feature films, Stephen is also a poet of emerging reputation, whose poetry has been published in literary journals such as Prairie Schooner and Nimrod. His first collection of poetry, Claptrap: Notes from Hollywood http://www.authorsbookshop.com/gyllenhaalclaptrap/, was published in June, 2006 by Cantara Christopher's New York-based literary small press, Cantarabooks http://www.cantarabooks.com.

Filmography

• (1979) Exit 10
• (1985) Certain Fury
• (1991) Paris Trout
• (1992) Waterland
• (1993) A Dangerous Woman
• (1995) Losing Isaiah
• (1998) Homegrown

References

External links

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