Steve Kloves was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Sunnyvale, California. He graduated from Fremont High School before attending the University of California, Los Angeles, where he dropped out after not being accepted into the film school in his third year.
Kloves then began working as an unpaid intern for a Hollywood agent, where he gained attention for a screenplay he wrote called Swings. This led to a meeting where he successfully pitched Racing with the Moon (1984). His first experience with professional screenwriting left him wanting more interaction with the actors so that the characters would stay true to his vision.
Kloves went on to write The Fabulous Baker Boys, which was intended to be his directorial debut. After years of trying to sell the project in Hollywood, the film finally got off the ground and was released in 1989. The Fabulous Baker Boys did reasonably well, but his next shot as writer/director for Flesh and Bone in 1993 fared poorly at the box office.
Kloves then stopped writing for three years, but eventually returned to the craft, adapting Michael Chabon's novel Wonder Boys into a screenplay. His screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award after the film's release in 2000. Warner Bros. then sent Kloves a list of novels that the company was considering to adapt as films, which included the first Harry Potter novel. Kloves was intrigued by the idea and went on to write the screenplays for the first four films in the series.
After Michael Goldenberg wrote the screenplay for the fifth film, Kloves returned to write the sixth, seventh, and eighth installments of the series. As of 2011, Kloves is working on a film adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which he will write and direct. He has also written a draft of the yet unproduced fantasy film Akira.
