Concern grows over fate of actor Spalding Gray

By Josh Getlin
Los Angeles Times

	Spalding Gray
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NEW YORK — Spalding Gray, an aristocratic-looking actor and writer best known for monologues such as "Swimming to Cambodia" and "Gray's Anatomy," has been missing from his New York home for eight days — and family members fear the worst, given his bouts with depression and two previous suicide attempts.

Gray, 62, was supposed to visit a friend in Manhattan on Jan. 10 and board a flight to Denver the next day for a ski trip. But he disappeared after taking his family to see the movie "Big Fish" and has not been seen since, according to Sgt. Kevin Hayes, New York police spokesman.

Gray officially becomes a missing person tomorrow.

The actor left his wallet and plane tickets behind in his Tribeca apartment and "then simply vanished," according to Sara Vass, a family friend and spokeswoman. "There is great worry, enormous concern that he be found alive because Spalding has been suffering from deep depression and had been fighting mightily on every front, physically and mentally."

Gray's wife, Kathleen Russo, and family friends are concerned especially over reports that a despondent-looking man resembling Gray was spotted on the night of his disappearance aboard the Staten Island ferry, perhaps preparing to jump, Vass said.

In September, she said, Gray had phoned his wife and said he was going to jump off the ferry; he actually had boarded the craft, but police were alerted and removed him from the ship.

He tried suicide several times, including an attempt in late 2002 to jump off a bridge on Long Island. A passer-by talked him down.

Police have not been able to search the waters between Manhattan and Staten Island in recent days because of icy conditions.

At the core of Gray's unhappiness, friends said, was his slow recovery from painful injuries suffered in a 2001 automobile accident in Ireland. The actor had a series of operations to heal a fractured skill, brain damage, a shattered hip and other injuries.

"I have lost my sense of humor since the accident," he told The Salt Lake Tribune in March 2003. "I get up to walk, and I limp and I remember the accident."

He had made progress in recent months, however.

Urbane, soft-spoken and keenly intelligent, Gray helped popularize the monologue as both a theatrical and cinematic art form in the 1980s, when he began performing "Swimming to Cambodia," a penetrating account of his role as a bit-actor in the movie "The Killing Fields," about the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Like other Gray monologues, the performance quickly expanded to include discourses on American foreign policy, religion, celebrity, mortality, sex and love.

His disappearance "breaks my heart," said Carey Perloff, artistic director of American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where Gray tried out material about the car crash during a revival of "Swimming to Cambodia" in 2001.

Perloff said Gray "always had a death obsession."

"He's such a survivor," she said. "But I worried about him when he was out here last time. You could feel that his creative energy ... was damaged."

Details on Gray's auto accident and 2002 suicide attempt were provided by The Associated Press.

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