Steven Rales

Origins and early life

Steven Rales was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 31 March 1951, the eldest of the four sons of Norman Rales and Ruth Abramson, and moved with his family to Bethesda, Maryland, in 1965. He grew up in a Jewish family: his father had spent his childhood in New York's Hebrew Orphan Asylum, a home for Jewish children, and his parents later paid for the building that houses the Ruth Rales Jewish Family Service in South Palm Beach County, Florida.

He graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda in 1969 and from DePauw University in 1973, and earned a law degree at American University in 1978.

Work and career

In 1983 he and his younger brother Mitchell took control of Diversified Mortgage Investors, a real estate trust created in 1969, and in 1984 they renamed it Danaher, after a mountain stream in western Montana, and set about turning it into an industrial company. He has chaired its board since 1984, was its chief executive until 1990, and with his brother shaped the Danaher Business System, the method of continuous improvement the company adopted in 1988.

Over the following decades Danaher moved into health care, buying its first diagnostics business in 2004 and spinning off its industrial arm as Fortive in 2016, and today it serves biotechnology, life sciences and diagnostics. In 2006 he founded Indian Paintbrush, a film production company in Santa Monica that has backed the films of Wes Anderson since The Darjeeling Limited in 2007.

Recognition

On 10 March 2024 he and Anderson won the Academy Award for best live-action short film for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, their first win after two earlier nominations together. In May 2024 he acquired the Criterion Collection, founded in 1984, together with its sister company Janus Films, which curate and distribute a large library of classic films.