Spalding Gray – Rhode Island’s finest

Every so often nature produces a personality whose intellect and talent are so prodigious that they can be officially considered a one-off, a welcome freak of nature who breathes new life into a jaded artistic community.

Spalding Gray was such a person, a true Renaissance man whose Wikipedia listing states that he was an actor, playwright, screenwriter, performance artist and monologist – not a bad tally for a man who died when he was only 63 years old.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island on June 5th 1941 to factory worker Rockwell Gray Sr. and his wife, Betty Horton, the young Spalding was brought up a Christian Scientist. During his childhood the family lived in Barrington, Rhode Island and enjoyed summer holidays at his grandmother’s house in Newport. After gaining a B.A. in poetry at Emerson College in 1963 and starting his acting career in the provinces Spalding, like many small-town young men of his generation, moved to the big city to pursue a career in the arts.

In 1965 he accepted a position as poetry lecturer at the Esalen Institute in San Francisco, but after his mother’s suicide in 1967 he moved back east to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life.

It is generally believed that Spalding’s career only took off in the 1980s when the artistic temperature spawned a new genre – the autobiographical monologue. Following a small part in the 1984 Oscar-winning film, The Killing Fields, he wrote and performed in a play, Swimming to Cambodia, which set the standard for his later creations.

Spalding’s characteristic attitude was that of the archetypal WASP, an American sub-species particularly prevalent in areas like Rhode Island and Massachusetts, who frequently feels at odds with life in the modern world.

Spalding was on holiday in Mexico when he learned of his mother’s suicide and, coincidentally, it was another holiday that ultimately ended his own life. Driving around Ireland in 2001 he was involved in a terrible accident, which resulted in an operation to remove bone splinters from the frontal cortex of his brain.

The combination of a genetic predisposition to depression and brain damage proved his undoing. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt in 2002, Spalding finally succeeded in killing himself in 2004. His body was pulled from the East River and, although details of his last moments were never precisely known, it is generally accepted that he threw himself over the side of the Staten Island ferry.

With his death America lost one of its most original and fearless voices, and Rhode Island one of its most talented sons.

Kathleen Russo, his second wife, later spoke of Spalding’s emotional reaction to Tim Burton’s film, Big Fish, just before his death. His favourite line? “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.”

New post on at Monday, 29 March, 2010, 1:14 pm and is archived in Lifestyle, People. Subscribe to answers with RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.