Raiders earned Spielberg another Oscar nod for Best Director and spawned two hit sequels, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), both directed by Spielberg. Spielberg made another slam-dunk the following year, writing and directing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the heartwrenching story of a little boy who befriends an alien stranded on Earth. With its air of magic and unapologetic sentiment, E.T. met with a measure of box-office success that dwarfed even Jaws with a total haul of almost $400 million. The movie remained the hallmark of Spielberg’s illustrious career in the years to come, and also launched the career of the filmmaker’s young goddaughter, Drew Barrymore.

Also in 1982, Spielberg got his first producer credit, for the hit thriller Poltergeist. He formed his own production company, Amblin Entertainment, in 1984, and would go on to produce a number of critically and commercially successful films, notably Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), in addition to his own directorial features.

Facing criticism that he couldn’t direct a “serious” movie aimed at adults, Spielberg decided to produce and direct a film adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple. Though the film, released in 1986 and starring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah Winfrey, earned 11 Academy Award nominations, Spielberg was overlooked in the directing category, which was perceived as a definite slight. The following year, the Academy made amends by giving Spielberg the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, given to "creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production."

In the late 1980s, a string of relative disappointments, including Empire of the Sun (1987), Always (1989), and Hook (1991), coincided with a period of personal upheaval for Spielberg. In 1989, he divorced his wife of four years, the actress Amy Irving, with whom he had a son, Max. The following year, he had a daughter, Sasha, with Kate Capshaw, the costar of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The couple married in October 1991 and have a total of five children together. (Capshaw also has a daughter, Jessica, from a previous marriage.) Spielberg made a major career resurgence in 1993 with the special effect-heavy dinosaur extravaganza Jurassic Park.