Spalding Gray
Spalding Gray
Spalding Rockwell Graywas an American actor and writer. He is known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth5 June 1941
CityProvidence, RI
CountryUnited States of America
garage joined performance performing richard worked york
When I first came to New York City in 1967, I joined up with Richard Schechner's Performance Group - where we worked in the Performing Garage in SoHo.
ask health involved people
When people used to ask me why I got involved with Hollywood films, I would say jokingly that it was for the health insurance.
christ coming mom nervous
When Mom had her first nervous breakdown, she said she had a vision of Christ coming to her in the living room.
I'm basically a fearful person. I'm a phobic person.
decipher pleasure stay yorkers
What's so fascinating about New Yorkers is that each person has a whole lexicon of personal logic in the way that they decipher and do what has to be done to enjoy, stay alive, take pleasure in this place.
america coast embrace knew move moved supposed york
I knew I couldn't live in America, and I wasn't ready to move to Europe, so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City... It was tolerant. It was a place that tolerated differences and could incorporate them and embrace them, which was what America was supposed to be about and wasn't.
behind emerson life man stories table tells trained true
I'm the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life. I'm also an actor. I was trained as an actor at Emerson College, and I use that training to play myself.
ended guided ivy league onward raised rejected simply wasp
I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.
allowed extent limiting tv
Radio allowed me to be a creator, and TV stole that creation from me by literalizing - and to some extent limiting - my vision.
cast jew looks woody
I may look like an American WASPy doctor or lawyer, but I feel just like Woody Allen. Don't cast me for my looks - I have a very ironic, existential, crazy Jew in me.
confused happening love understood york
I think of my father and how confused he was by me. He understood my love for theater, and he understood that New York City was the only place that it was happening in America, really, in any live way.
sex might skiing
Skiing is better than sex actually, because for me a good round of sex might be seven minutes. Skiing you can do for seven hours.
moving psychosis camels
I refer to jet lag as 'jet-psychosis - there's an old saying that the spirit cannot move faster than a camel.
suicide mother waiting
I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.