Spalding Gray's Death

The autobiographer Spalding Gray died at the age of 62. Here is all you want to know, and more!

Biography - A Short Wiki

American actor and writer whose autobiographical monologue, “Swimming to Cambodia,” received widespread acclaim and was adapted into a 1987 film. He also wrote and performed several one-man shows, including “Monster in a Box” and “Gray’s Anatomy.”

He married his first wife, Renee Shafransky, in 1991. His decade-long marriage to second wife, Kathleen Russo, ended with his 2004 suicide. He had two sons, Forrest and Theo.

Gray, who had a history of depression, had committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island ferry, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department.

Quotes

"

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.

"

Radio allowed me to be a creator, and TV stole that creation from me by literalizing – and to some extent limiting – my vision.

"

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.

"

If I can make people laugh it’s like being a good lover.

"

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.