Spalding Gray

A desk, a glass of water, a notebook and a man talking. That was the act, and it was one of the most distinctive things in American theatre through the 1980s and 1990s. Gray wrote and performed autobiographical monologues, and from 1987 he adapted them for film with a series of different directors.

The famous one grew out of a day job. He took a small part as a U.S. consul in The Killing Fields, came back from the production with far more material than the role could hold, and turned the experience into Swimming to Cambodia. That is the pattern of his whole career in miniature: the monologues are entirely his, the film work is entirely other people's, and the second funded the first.

Read the credit list and a joke emerges. Dr. Geisler in Kate & Leopold, Dr. Miller on The Nanny, Prof. Jackson in How High, Dr. Richard Milstein in Beaches, Dr. Erdman in Straight Talk, Dr. Rodney in Seven Minutes in Heaven, a doctor in The Pickle, a priest in Twenty Bucks. He was hired again and again to be the educated man who delivers bad news in a calm voice, which is close to what he did on stage, minus the confession.

There are better parts inside that run. Earl Culver in True Stories lets him talk at length, which is what he was built for. Mr. Mungo in King of the Hill is genuinely sad work. Paul Bladden in The Paper gives him a newsroom to be insufferable in, and Simon Veatch in Diabolique is the oily little part he could do without effort. He died in 2004.