In 1983, Heather Milgram gave her son a motorcycle for his sixteenth birthday. Her stated reason was to promote fearlessness. By that point in his life, the gift made a certain sense.
Schreiber had already grown up in a Lower East Side walkup with no electricity or running water, spent time at a yoga ashram in Connecticut under a Hindu name his mother had chosen for him, and been barred from watching colour films until he was ten. His first colour movie was Star Wars, in 1977. His favourites before that were Charlie Chaplin and Basil Rathbone, watched at a black-and-white revival cinema near their neighbourhood.
Heather Milgram is ninety-one years old. She lives at an ashram in rural Virginia and has not spoken for publication in more than twenty-five years.
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Who Is Heather Milgram?
Heather Milgram is an American painter and the mother of actor Liev Schreiber. Born on July 26, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, she was married three times and has four children. Under the name Heather Schreiber, she holds one screen credit on IMDb: the 2005 film White Crow, in which she was prominently featured. She has been connected to the Integral Yoga movement founded by Swami Satchidananda since at least the 1970s and currently lives at Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville, in Buckingham County, Virginia.
Her Family Background in Brooklyn
Her father, Alexander Milgram, emigrated from the Russian Empire and settled in Brooklyn. He played the cello, owned a collection of Pierre-Auguste Renoir etchings, and made his living delivering meat to restaurants across the city. Her mother, Hazel, was a native New Yorker, born in 1909.
The household was working class and politically Communist. Classical music and Russian literature were taken seriously, and both became fixed interests that Heather carried into her adult life and passed to her son. Her father, Alex Milgram, ended up as the most significant adult male presence in Liev Schreiber’s childhood, far more central to his upbringing than his own father ever was.
One detail that rarely surfaces in accounts of Heather Milgram’s life: when she was twelve years old, her mother was lobotomised. That fact was reported in a December 1999 New Yorker profile of Liev Schreiber by the critic John Lahr. It goes some way toward explaining the decisions Heather made in later life, particularly her documented fear of psychiatric institutions and everything that followed from it.
Three Marriages and the Road to San Francisco
Heather married Jack Lemkin in 1953. The marriage lasted two years. Her second marriage, to Jeremy S. Connolly, began in 1956. By the time she met Tell Schreiber, she already had three sons from those earlier marriages, though their names have not been documented in any reliable public source.
Tell Carroll Schreiber III was seven years younger than Heather, from a wealthy Protestant family in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a Dartmouth graduate and former wrestler. They married in San Francisco, where Liev was born on October 4, 1967.
A Breakdown, British Columbia, and a Custody Battle
Shortly after the marriage, according to Tell Schreiber’s own account, Heather had a severe bad experience on LSD. Over the following four years, she was repeatedly hospitalised and underwent therapy. Tell moved the family to Winlaw, a small rural community in the southern interior of British Columbia, hoping the change would help her recover.
It made things worse. After Tell threatened to have her permanently committed to a mental institution, Heather took Liev and left.
Private detectives hired by Tell tracked them from state to state. When Liev was three, Tell located him at an upstate New York commune where Heather had settled and took the boy back. The custody battle that followed was long and expensive enough to financially destroy her father, Alex Milgram. Heather won custody. The divorce was finalised around 1972.
By the time Liev was four, the two of them were in a fourth-floor walkup at First Avenue and First Street on the Lower East Side. His half-brothers from Heather’s earlier marriages were across the city, living with their father in a duplex on Central Park West.
How Heather Milgram Raised Liev Schreiber on the Lower East Side
The apartment had candles pushed into the brickwork for light. They slept on a mattress on the floor. There was no running water. Heather, in one of the few direct statements she ever made about those years, called it romantic. That word appeared in the 1999 New Yorker profile and remains one of the only times she described her own circumstances on record.
To support them both, she held several jobs at once:
- Drove a cab in New York City
- Made and sold papier-mâché puppets on the street
- Picked through discarded garbage for usable material
- Worked at the Integral Yoga Institute, the New York base of Swami Satchidananda’s organisation
At times, the two of them were on welfare. She taught Liev to read in that apartment.
Her choices in raising him were deliberate and specific:
- She gave him the Hindu name Shiva Das
- She dressed him in yoga shirts and kept his hair long, to his shoulders
- She enforced a strictly vegetarian diet
- She banned colour films entirely from his childhood
- When he was twelve, she enrolled him at the Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville East, in Pomfret, Connecticut, where he went by the name Shiva Das
Star Wars, in 1977, was the first colour film Liev Schreiber ever saw. He was ten. Until then, his screen heroes were Chaplin and Rathbone. In 1983, she bought him the motorcycle and told him why.
Heather Milgram: Key Life Events
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1934 | Born July 26 in Brooklyn, New York |
| c. 1946 | Her mother is lobotomised; Heather is twelve |
| 1953 | Marries Jack Lemkin |
| 1955 | Divorces Jack Lemkin |
| 1956 | Marries Jeremy S. Connolly |
| 1967 | Liev Schreiber born in San Francisco, October 4 |
| c. 1968 | Family moves to Winlaw, British Columbia |
| c. 1972 | Divorces Tell Schreiber; settles on Manhattan’s Lower East Side |
| 1977 | Liev sees his first colour film, Star Wars, aged ten |
| 1979 | Enrolls Liev at Satchidananda Ashram, Pomfret, Connecticut |
| 1983 | Buys Liev a motorcycle for his sixteenth birthday |
| 1999 | Speaks to the New Yorker. Last known public statement |
| 2005 | Appears in White Crow, credited as Heather Schreiber |
| 2021 | Tell Schreiber dies in Seattle, March 1, aged seventy-nine |
What Liev Schreiber Has Said About His Mother
Liev Schreiber has spoken about Heather Milgram across more than thirty years of interviews. The description that follows her in print to this day came from that same 1999 New Yorker profile, where Schreiber called her “a far-out Socialist Labor Party hippie bohemian freak who hung out with William Burroughs.”
In 2008, after his son Sasha was born, he told W Magazine:
“Since I’ve had Sasha, I’ve completely identified with everything my mother went through raising me. And I think her choices were inspired.”
Once he had the money to do something about it, he bought her a swimming pool.
John Lahr, in that 1999 New Yorker piece, wrote the sentence that has trailed Heather Milgram through every subsequent article:
“To a large extent, Schreiber’s professional shape-shifting and his uncanny instinct for isolating the frightened, frail, goofy parts of his characters are a result of being forced to adapt to his mother’s eccentricities. It’s both his grief and his gift.”
In most of those subsequent articles, only half of that sentence gets printed. The gift makes it in. The grief usually does not.
Where Is Heather Milgram Now?
Heather Milgram lives at Yogaville, the Satchidananda Ashram in Buckingham County, Virginia, which sits on six hundred acres along the James River and serves as the international base of Swami Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga organisation.
Her connection to this movement spans her adult life. She worked at the Integral Yoga Institute in New York when Liev was a child. She sent him to the Connecticut ashram at twelve. Yogaville is where that path eventually led.
Tell Schreiber died on March 1, 2021, in Seattle, at seventy-nine, after a two-month struggle with cancer. He had spent his later years as a woodworker and community theatre director on Bainbridge Island, Washington. He and Heather had been divorced for nearly fifty years by then.
The last public statement Heather Milgram made dates to December 1999. Speaking to the New Yorker, she said: “I think I liked silence and not being connected to the world.”
In the twenty-five years since, the account of Heather Milgram’s life has been assembled almost entirely from someone else’s telling of it.
