Spalding Gray

Spalding Gray was an American actor and writer who became known for autobiographical monologues he wrote and performed on stage in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he started in New York theater in the late 1960s and co-founded the Wooster Group, working with the company from 1975 to 1980. He played a consular official in The Killing Fields (1984), the experience behind his best known monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, which he adapted into a 1987 film directed by Jonathan Demme. Further monologues became Monster in a Box (1991) and Gray's Anatomy (1996). He won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Book Award in 1985, took the lead in a 1988 Lincoln Center revival of Our Town, published a novel, Impossible Vacation, in 1992, and played supporting roles in films. He died in 2004. Steven Soderbergh's documentary And Everything Is Going Fine appeared in 2010.