Gray managed to relate his personal turmoil to larger issues of morality throughout the play, including absurdities in filmmaking, prostitution in Bangkok (where the movie was shot), and the genocidal reign of the Pol Pot. Both haunting and humorous, the plainsong sincerity of his performance exuded a raw immediacy and fragile power. His experiences making The Killing Fields formed the basis of his one-man stage show Swimming to Cambodia which premiered on Off-Broadway in 1985. These productions were all critical successes, and Gray soon became the darling of a small cult as his harrowing but funny takes on revealing the emotional and psychological cracks in his life brought some fresh air to the genre of performance art.Īlthough acting in small parts in film since the '70s, it wasn't until he garnered a role in The Killing Fields (1984), that he began to gain more prominent exposure. His first formal monologue was about his childhood Sex and Death to the Age 14, performed at the Performing Garage in Manhattan in 1979 next came his adventures as a young university student Booze, Cars and College Girls in 1980 and the following year, he dealt with his chronicles as a struggling actor, A Personal History of the American Theater. It was this period in the late '70s, when he was performing in Manhattan's underground theater circles, did Gray carve out his niche as a skilled monologist. Three years later he co-founded the avant-garde theatrical troupe, The Wooster Group with Willem Dafoe. He scored a breakthrough when he landed the lead role of Hoss in Sam Shepard's Off-Broadway hit Tooth of Crime in its 1973 New York premiere. After graduation, he relocated to New York, where he acted in several plays in the late '60s and early '70s. ![]() He began pursuing an acting career at Emerson College in Boston. Gray was born in Barrington, Rhode Island on June 5, 1941, one of three sons born to Rockwell and Elizabeth Gray. ![]() He had been missing for two months and family members had feared he had committed suicide. Spalding Gray, the self-effacing monologist and actor, whose best work offered a sublime mix of personal confessions and politically charged insights, was confirmed dead on March 8 one day after his body was found in New York City's East River.
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