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.

Stone was admitted to Yale University, but left in June 1965 at age 18[12][21] to teach high school students English for six months in Saigon at the Free Pacific Institute in South Vietnam.

[34] On July 4, 2024, Stone was awarded the rank of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, the highest civilian honor in France, for cultural contributions to both the country and the film industry.

Stone graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film in 1971, where his teachers included director and fellow NYU alumnus Martin Scorsese.

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).

[39] Stone wrote further features, including 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.

Platoon is a semi-autobiographical film about Stone's experience in combat; Born on the Fourth of July is based on the autobiography of US Marine turned peace campaigner Ron Kovic; Heaven & Earth is based on the memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, in which Le Ly Hayslip recalls her life as a Vietnamese village girl drastically affected by the war and who finds another life in the USA.

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison—a rock critic and author—was a consultant on the movie, in which she makes a cameo appearance, but she writes in her memoir Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison (Dutton, 1992) that Stone ignored everything she told him and proceeded with his own version of events.

After Alexander, Stone went on to direct World Trade Center, based on the true story of two PAPD policemen who were trapped in the rubble and survived the September 11 attacks.

Stone wrote and directed the George W. Bush biopic W., chronicling the former president's: childhood, relationship with his father, struggles with alcoholism, rediscovery of his Christian faith, and continues the rest of his life up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

[57] In July of that same year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published his first memoir, Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game, which chronicles his turbulent upbringing in New York City, volunteering for combat in Vietnam, and the trials and triumphs of moviemaking in the 1970s and '80s.

He made Persona Non Grata, a documentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations, interviewing several notable figures of Israel, including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres, as well as Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

First is the notion that the central conflict of the 20th century can be laid at the feet of a right-wing military conspiracy... Stone's second flawed assumption in Untold History is that capitalism coordinated the military-industrial complex's agenda.

Two years later in 2016, Stone was executive producer for Ukrainian-born director Igor Lopatonok's film Ukraine on Fire, interviewing pro-Russian figures surrounding the Revolution of Dignity such as Viktor Yanukovich and Vladimir Putin.

[84] During these interviews, Putin made an unproven claim about Georgian snipers being responsible for the February 20 killings of protesters during the Euromaidan demonstrations, a hypothesis Stone himself had earlier supported on Twitter.

[86] In 2021, he also produced and featured in Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, directed by Lopatonok, an eight-hour film consisting of Stone interviewing Kazakh politician and former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev.

[87][88] The film received at least $5 million funding from Nazarbayev's own charitable foundation, Elbasy, via the country's State Center for Support of National Cinema, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

[100] Roger Ebert called Stone "a filmmaker of feverish energy and limitless technical skills, able to assemble a bewildering array of facts and fancies and compose them into a film without getting bogged down.

As a child, Sean acted in supporting roles in several of his father's films, and later worked for the Russia state media company RT America as a program host from 2015-2022.

"[113] In 1997, Stone was one of 34 celebrities to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested against the treatment of Scientologists in Germany and compared it to the Nazis' oppression of Jews in the 1930s.

[130][131] In Showtime's The Putin Interviews, Stone called Joseph Stalin "the most famous villain in history, next to Adolf [Hitler]", who "left a horrible reputation, and stained the [Communist] ideology forever ... it's mixed with blood, and terror.

He said: "On the contrary, Obama has doubled down on the (George W.) Bush administration policies," and "has created...the most massive global security surveillance state that's ever been seen, way beyond East Germany's Stasi".

[145] In April 2018, Stone attended a press conference at the Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, where he likened Donald Trump to "Beelzebub", the biblical demonic figure.

"[148] On his social media, Stone detailed eleven reasons why he could never vote for Trump, including his policies on Israel, Cuba and Venezuela, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani and his pardons of three court-martialed U.S. military officers who were accused or convicted of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[153] In the 2024 general presidential election, Stone again voted for Kennedy who, after failing to secure the Democratic nomination, appeared on the ballot as the American Independent Party candidate.

[160][161] Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said, "Oliver Stone has once again shown his conspiratorial colors with his comments about 'Jewish domination of the media' and control over U.S. foreign policy.

[163] A day later, Stone stated: In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret.

[167] Stone visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2013 and commented, "I don't think most people in the US realize how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support."

"[146] Stone has had an interest in Latin America since the 1980s, when he directed Salvador, and later returned to make his documentary South of the Border about the left-leaning movements that had been taking hold in the region.

[183][184] In a June 2017 interview with The Nation to promote his documentary on Vladimir Putin, Stone rejected the narrative of the United States' intelligence agencies that Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential election.