Acclaimed Actor Spalding Gray Found Dead
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 9, 2004; Page B04
Spalding Gray, 62, the celebrated performance artist whose one-man shows, such as "Swimming to Cambodia," displayed wryly disconnected blends of irony, delight and fear, was pulled from the Brooklyn side of the East River on March 7.
Mr. Gray was reported missing by his family Jan. 11 after he walked out of his New York apartment without credit cards or any form of identification. A spokeswoman for the New York medical examiner said that Mr. Gray was identified through dental records and that the cause of death was still under investigation.
Mr. Gray, whose mother killed herself, said he spent a lifetime contemplating death and his own suicide. A deeply literate man, he used words as a "healing" device for his own troubled upbringing and to make sense of his obsessions and curiosities during his career as an actor and writer.
Known to a mass audience for character parts in movies including "The Killing Fields" (1984), "The Paper" (1994) and "Kate & Leopold" (2001), Mr. Gray was best known for a series of memorable staged monologues that drew from his restless imagination, maverick personality and political awareness.
"Swimming to Cambodia" (1985) was based on his eight weeks in southeast Asia during filming of "The Killing Fields," in which he played the U.S. ambassador's aide during the rise of the Khmer Rouge. The play focused on the filmmaking process but also explored U.S. responsibility for the ravages in Cambodia and truths about his own perceived failures and darkest personal secrets.
On stage, he used minimal sets -- a glass of water and a desk, sometimes a few maps and a pointer.
"Underneath the apparent disorder . . . is an original and disciplined artistic temperament at work," Washington Post theater critic David Richards wrote. "It is not too much to say that Gray fishes up much of the glory and chaos of our times in the crazy autobiographical net he casts. Talking about himself -- with candor, humor, imagination and the unfailingly bizarre image -- he ends up talking about all of us."
With a deluge of publicity after "Swimming to Cambodia," which ran two years, many of his pieces were published in book form and made into films. He was conflicted about Hollywood, where he found promotional appearances mind-numbingly dull. And, yet, he was a man who fed on the experience.
Once, he told The Washington Post, he was walking on a Sunday morning in the Bowery district of lower Manhattan and saw a group of prostitutes. He joined them. Suddenly, a car filled with Hasidic Jews stopped, and one man summoned Mr. Gray. Instead of walking away, he went to see what they wanted.
Get in the car, one man said. Again, he followed the order and found that they had mistaken him for a Bowery bum. They wanted to feed him in exchange for doing yardwork at their synagogue.
"By that time, I was calling myself 'Pete' and had a whole story about how I ended up on the streets," Mr. Gray said.
He agreed to do the yardwork and even haggled over his fee. He got $10 -- $8 for the work, $2 for cab fare home.
Mr. Gray was born in Barrington, R.I., the son of a factory worker and a housewife. As a child, he was academically unambitious, preferring instead the "petty demolition" of placing cherry bombs in the school toilets.
He and his two brothers were raised as Christian Scientists, the religion to which his mother converted after her first nervous breakdown. After a second breakdown, she killed herself in 1967 with automobile exhaust in the family garage. Mr. Gray found himself haunted by the death as he waded through college and his adult responsibilities.
While attending Emerson College in Boston, he worked as a dishwasher at a nearby girls' school and found his first success as a raconteur by telling his co-workers his compulsive accounts of the day's events.
He moved to New York in the late 1960s and was an actor with experimental-theater groups. He often collaborated with his girlfriend, Elizabeth LeCompte, with whom he formed a theater troupe, the Wooster Group.
He wrote a trilogy called "Three Places in Rhode Island," which exposed family secrets and his self-doubts in a discomforting and compelling way.
In 1978, while teaching in California, Mr. Gray became convinced that the white middle class life he had long known was dying. He was struck by a friend's reply: "During the collapse of Rome, the last artists were the chroniclers."
Using more humor than before, Mr. Gray wrote a series of monologues devoted to a particular period in his own development as a man and a performer, "Sex and Death to the Age 14," "Booze, Cars and College Girls" and "A Personal History of the American Theater."
He wrote about his fears of writing in "Monster in a Box" (1990), in which he played "a man who can't write a book about a man who can't take a vacation." The same events that tortured him again became grist for his play. At one point, he has his mother ask, "How shall I do it, dear? How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?"
His later works included "Gray's Anatomy," about his struggle with a serious eye problem, and "It's a Slippery Slope," about a midlife crisis.
His struggle with depression was worsened by a debilitating car crash in 2001. He wrote about the incident and an attempted suicide in "Life Interrupted."
He told the Associated Press in 1997 that he hoped his epitaph would read: "An American Original: Troubled, Inner-Directed and Cannot Type."
His marriage to writer-director Renee Shafransky ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife, Kathleen Russo; two sons from his second marriage; a stepdaughter; and two brothers.
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 9, 2004; Page B04
Spalding Gray, 62, the celebrated performance artist whose one-man shows, such as "Swimming to Cambodia," displayed wryly disconnected blends of irony, delight and fear, was pulled from the Brooklyn side of the East River on March 7.
Mr. Gray was reported missing by his family Jan. 11 after he walked out of his New York apartment without credit cards or any form of identification. A spokeswoman for the New York medical examiner said that Mr. Gray was identified through dental records and that the cause of death was still under investigation.
Mr. Gray, whose mother killed herself, said he spent a lifetime contemplating death and his own suicide. A deeply literate man, he used words as a "healing" device for his own troubled upbringing and to make sense of his obsessions and curiosities during his career as an actor and writer.
Known to a mass audience for character parts in movies including "The Killing Fields" (1984), "The Paper" (1994) and "Kate & Leopold" (2001), Mr. Gray was best known for a series of memorable staged monologues that drew from his restless imagination, maverick personality and political awareness.
"Swimming to Cambodia" (1985) was based on his eight weeks in southeast Asia during filming of "The Killing Fields," in which he played the U.S. ambassador's aide during the rise of the Khmer Rouge. The play focused on the filmmaking process but also explored U.S. responsibility for the ravages in Cambodia and truths about his own perceived failures and darkest personal secrets.
On stage, he used minimal sets -- a glass of water and a desk, sometimes a few maps and a pointer.
"Underneath the apparent disorder . . . is an original and disciplined artistic temperament at work," Washington Post theater critic David Richards wrote. "It is not too much to say that Gray fishes up much of the glory and chaos of our times in the crazy autobiographical net he casts. Talking about himself -- with candor, humor, imagination and the unfailingly bizarre image -- he ends up talking about all of us."
With a deluge of publicity after "Swimming to Cambodia," which ran two years, many of his pieces were published in book form and made into films. He was conflicted about Hollywood, where he found promotional appearances mind-numbingly dull. And, yet, he was a man who fed on the experience.
Once, he told The Washington Post, he was walking on a Sunday morning in the Bowery district of lower Manhattan and saw a group of prostitutes. He joined them. Suddenly, a car filled with Hasidic Jews stopped, and one man summoned Mr. Gray. Instead of walking away, he went to see what they wanted.
Get in the car, one man said. Again, he followed the order and found that they had mistaken him for a Bowery bum. They wanted to feed him in exchange for doing yardwork at their synagogue.
"By that time, I was calling myself 'Pete' and had a whole story about how I ended up on the streets," Mr. Gray said.
He agreed to do the yardwork and even haggled over his fee. He got $10 -- $8 for the work, $2 for cab fare home.
Mr. Gray was born in Barrington, R.I., the son of a factory worker and a housewife. As a child, he was academically unambitious, preferring instead the "petty demolition" of placing cherry bombs in the school toilets.
He and his two brothers were raised as Christian Scientists, the religion to which his mother converted after her first nervous breakdown. After a second breakdown, she killed herself in 1967 with automobile exhaust in the family garage. Mr. Gray found himself haunted by the death as he waded through college and his adult responsibilities.
While attending Emerson College in Boston, he worked as a dishwasher at a nearby girls' school and found his first success as a raconteur by telling his co-workers his compulsive accounts of the day's events.
He moved to New York in the late 1960s and was an actor with experimental-theater groups. He often collaborated with his girlfriend, Elizabeth LeCompte, with whom he formed a theater troupe, the Wooster Group.
He wrote a trilogy called "Three Places in Rhode Island," which exposed family secrets and his self-doubts in a discomforting and compelling way.
In 1978, while teaching in California, Mr. Gray became convinced that the white middle class life he had long known was dying. He was struck by a friend's reply: "During the collapse of Rome, the last artists were the chroniclers."
Using more humor than before, Mr. Gray wrote a series of monologues devoted to a particular period in his own development as a man and a performer, "Sex and Death to the Age 14," "Booze, Cars and College Girls" and "A Personal History of the American Theater."
He wrote about his fears of writing in "Monster in a Box" (1990), in which he played "a man who can't write a book about a man who can't take a vacation." The same events that tortured him again became grist for his play. At one point, he has his mother ask, "How shall I do it, dear? How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?"
His later works included "Gray's Anatomy," about his struggle with a serious eye problem, and "It's a Slippery Slope," about a midlife crisis.
His struggle with depression was worsened by a debilitating car crash in 2001. He wrote about the incident and an attempted suicide in "Life Interrupted."
He told the Associated Press in 1997 that he hoped his epitaph would read: "An American Original: Troubled, Inner-Directed and Cannot Type."
His marriage to writer-director Renee Shafransky ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife, Kathleen Russo; two sons from his second marriage; a stepdaughter; and two brothers.
