Stephen Desberg was born in Brussels in 1954 as the third child of an American lawyer from Cleveland and a French mother who taught him French at the Sorbonne after the Liberation of Paris. They settled in Brussels when Stephen's father became responsible for the distribution of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films in Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands. After finishing college two years late, he studied law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, but didn't finish his studies.