Irish Times: Edition 2WWED 10 MAR 2004, Page 38 Spalding Gray;Obituary;The Register Spalding Gray, monologist and actor, was born on June 5, 1941. He disappeared on January 10, 2004, aged 62. His body was found on March 7, 2004. Actor whose break came in The Killing Fields but whose name was made by the idiosyncratic one-man shows that followed. On paper -and indeed on screen -the role of the US consul in the epic 1984 film The Killing Fields had little to distinguish it from hundreds of other parts that put a vaguely human face on officialdom and authority each year. However it was to prove the turning point in the career of Spalding Gray, the actor. Gray, who was in his forties and had appeared in several films without attracting much attention, used his experience on The Killing Fields as the foundation of a one-man stage show Swimming to Cambodia, in which he discussed his film-making experience, praising the film's Thai hosts as "the nicest people money can buy". From there he spiralled off into a highly personal and idiosyncratic examination of Southeast Asian politics, assessing the influence of the French philosopher Rousseau on the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. The sprawling, two-part, three-hour stage show was trimmed to less than half its original length for a film version in 1987, directed by Jonathan Demme. Gray was filmed at a desk in the Performing Garage, a small New York Theatre, his only props a couple of maps and a pointer. It was the first and most successful of a series of filmed monologues, which saw the former bit-part player working with some of the biggest directors in the film business. Monster in a Box (1992), which chronicled his attempts to write a novel, was directed by the documentary maker Nick Broomfield, and Gray's Anatomy (1996), which followed his attempts to find a cure for an eye disorder, by Steven Soderbergh -testimony to the high standing with which Gray was held in the industry. He had attempted to kill himself and discussed suicide in his wandering, intimate monologues. He once said: "I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life." He had a history of depression, which intensified after he suffered serious head injuries in a car crash in Ireland in 2001. So his family and friends feared the worst when he disappeared in January, particularly after the last sightings placed him on the Staten Island ferry. His body was recovered from New York's East River on Sunday. The son of a factory worker, Gray was born on Rhode Island and the plaid shirts he wore seemed to suggest a slightly conservative background, the long hair being more a sign of forgetfulness than rebellion. But behind the facade was a troubled and complex man. His friend John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and internet guru, recalled defending LSD on a daytime television show. "Spalding planted himself in the audience, which was not exactly on my side," Barlow recalled. "At the right moment, he rose looking professorial and Protestant -the sort of Wasp he usually played on screen -and astonished the audience by giving a recondite, if slightly mad, homily on the connection between the psychedelic experience and enlightenment. We barely escaped untarred." Gray's father was an alcoholic, his mother suffered from chronic depression and Gray himself stopped speaking for a year after his dog died. His mother committed suicide when Gray was in his mid-teens. He worked as a refuse collector during the day and a dishwasher at night, and he attributed the development of his storytelling talents to evenings spent amusing the chefs with stories from his day job. After moving to New York, he worked with the cutting-edge theatre companies the Performance Group and the Wooster Group, and he also appeared in several "adult" films in the Seventies, including Little Orphan Dusty (1976), with John Holmes. Sex and Death to the Age 14 was the first of more than a dozen one-man shows and was staged in 1979. Over the next two decades his shows helped to promote and popularise the concept of confessional, one-man theatre, and several have been published in book form. "The man may be the ultimate Wasp neurotic, analysing his actions with an intensity that would be unpleasantly egomaniacal if it weren't so self-deprecatingly funny," wrote the Associated Press drama critic Michael Kuchwara in 1996. After The Killing Fields and Swimming to Cambodia, Gray was in demand for supporting roles, appearing in True Stories (1986); Stars and Bars (1988), as a clergyman; Clara's Heart (1988), as a doctor; the weepie Beaches (1988), as another doctor. In Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill (1993) he played an eccentric who kills himself. On Broadway he played the stage manager in a 1988 revival of Our Town. Other films include The Paper (1994), Beyond Rangoon (1995) and Kate and Leopold (2001), again playing a doctor in the time-travel romance with Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman. His first wife, Renee Shafransky, worked with him on his shows and directed several of the original stage productions, including Monster in a Box and Gray's Anatomy. The relationship ended with Gray drinking heavily, taking drugs and predicting his own demise. He subsequently married the costume designer Kathie Russo and appeared to come to terms with many of his personal demons. Gray and Russo each had a child from previous relationships and a new baby expanded the family further. The monologue It's a Slippery Slope, drew on his experiences of mid-life crisis, the demands of fatherhood and learning to ski. But he suffered serious head injuries in a horrific accident on holiday in Ireland in 2001, was plunged into even deeper depression and subsequently attempted to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. Performances of his latest monologue had to be cancelled after his disappearance. It reflected on the experience of the car crash and its aftermath and was entitled Life Interrupted. Caption: Gray's monologues ranged from the demands of fatherhood and difficulties of skiing to Rousseau's influence on Pol Pot. Photograph by JOE TABACCA / AP Section: FEATURES © Copyright. All rights reserved. Most articles on Newstext are copyright News Limited. Some copyright is owned by third parties. You may read this article on-screen or print it once for your own personal use. You may not make further copies, forward it by email, post it on an internet or intranet site or make any other use of it without written permission from us. These and any copyright licensing queries should be sent to us at newstext@newsltd.com.au