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André Gregory
French-American theatre director, writer and actor (born 1934) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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André William Gregory (born André William Josefowitz; May 11, 1934) is a French-born American theatre director, writer and actor. He is best known for co-writing and starring in My Dinner with Andre, a 1981 comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle. Gregory studied acting at The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City.[1]
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Early life
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Gregory was born André William Josefowitz in Paris, France, in 1934 to Russian Jewish parents.[2][3] His family fled from France during the Second World War in 1939, originally to London, England, before moving to the United States, where he grew up in Los Angeles.[4][5] They changed their surname from Josefowitz to Gregory.[5] As an adult, Gregory discovered that his father, who exported fur from the US to Russia was probably a Nazi sympathizer, as he represented Russia in Germany for IG Farben, a chemical company that produced Zyklon B used in concentration camps, which could have been the reason the family moved countries.[6][5]
Gregory's parents were extremely wealthy, and as a child Gregory spent the summers in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Westwood, in a house on Sunset Boulevard rented to them by Thomas Mann.[5] He also recalled them throwing house parties where celebrities they met through Marlene Dietrich were present including Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, and Errol Flynn.[5] However, Gregory also claims his parents were "wretched, negligent and self-absorbed, petty and often mean" and his father in particular as "the most frightening person in my life", and he had to spend some years of his adulthood in therapy.[5][7]
Gregory's love for acting came after he played Petruchio in a production of The Taming of the Shrew when he was twelve years old.[1][5] He studied at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House.
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Career
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1960s & 1970s
During the 1960s and 1970s, Gregory directed a number of avant-garde productions developed through ensemble collaboration, the most famous of which was Alice in Wonderland (1970), based on Lewis Carroll's two classic Alice books. He founded his own theatrical company, The Manhattan Project, in 1968. In 1975 he directed Our Late Night, the first produced play by Wallace Shawn, which began a long working relationship between the two men.
Shortly afterward, Gregory's growing misgivings about the role of theatre in modern life, and what he felt was a trend toward fascism in the United States, led him to abruptly abandon theatre and leave the country. As described in the film My Dinner with Andre (1981), he traveled to Poland at director Jerzy Grotowski's invitation, where he developed a number of experimental theatrical events for private audiences. He spent several years in a variety of esoteric spiritual communities (such as Findhorn) developing an interest and practice in what could be called New Age beliefs.
Although Gregory left the theatre in 1975, he has returned several times to direct small productions, usually for invited audiences. These included a long-running workshop of Uncle Vanya (adapted by David Mamet), which was developed from 1990 to 1994 and featured Shawn and Julianne Moore. Though never publicly performed, it was released as the film Vanya on 42nd Street by Gregory and Louis Malle. He appeared as himself, directing the play featured within the film. Gregory also directed a radio production of Shawn's play, The Designated Mourner, in 2002.
1980s + My Dinner with Andre
His best-known film performance was as the title character in My Dinner with Andre (1981), directed by Louis Malle, in which he and Wallace Shawn, playing characters based on themselves, have a long conversation over dinner. They discuss Gregory's spiritual sojourn in Europe and his doubts about the future of theatre and of Western civilization in general. The idea came after Gregory decided to return to theatre after many years away from it and asked Shawn to help him, who helped him develop the idea of two men with contrasting personalities in conversation. Directed by Louis Malle, it was filmed over the course of two weeks at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia and made its premier at premiere at the 1981 Telluride Film Festival and was praised by Roger Ebert.[8][9][10] It also won the award for Best American Film of 1981 at the 2nd Boston Society of Film Critics Awards and both Gregory and Shawn won Best Screenplay at the same ceremony.
He appeared with Goldie Hawn in Protocol (1984). In 1988 he played the father in Some Girls, with Jennifer Connelly and Patrick Dempsey. In 1993, he performed in the movie Demolition Man with Sylvester Stallone. Other character actor roles include John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ and Reverend Spellgood in The Mosquito Coast, and as Dante, a restaurateur, alongside Rosanna Arquette, David Bowie, and Buck Henry in The Linguini Incident.
2000s onwards
Returning to theatre, Gregory directed Shawn's play Grasses of a Thousand Colors, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in May 2009. He next worked with Shawn on a new version of Ibsen's The Master Builder.[11] This resulted in the film Fear of Falling (2013), directed by Jonathan Demme. The film was retitled A Master Builder at its opening in New York in June 2014.
In 2013, he directed Grasses of a Thousand Colors and The Designated Mourner, starring Shawn in a co-production between Theatre for a New Audience and The Public Theater in New York.[12] A 2013 documentary about Gregory's life, Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner, was directed by his wife, Cindy Kleine.[13] He and Kleine discussed it on the May 3, 2013, episode of Charlie Rose.[14] After working on it for seven years,[6] Gregory released his memoir, This Is Not My Memoir (with Todd London; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 9780374298548), in May 2020.[15]
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Marriages and family
Gregory was first married to Mercedes "Chiquita" Nebelthau, a documentary filmmaker who died from cancer in 1992.[6] They had two children together, Nicolas and Marina.[16] In 2000, he married filmmaker Cindy Kleine, who at the time of their marriage was thirty-nine, whereas Gregory was sixty-three.[17] They have lived in Truro, Massachusetts since the early 2000s.[6]
Filmography
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References
External links
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