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 film directed by Louis Malle, alongside his protégé Wallace Shawn. Gregory studied acting at The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City.
Early life
Gregory was born André William Josefowitz in Paris, France, in 1934 to Russian Jewish parents. His family fled from France to London in 1939 before moving to the United States, where he grew up in Los Angeles. The family subsequently changed its surname from Josefowitz to Gregory.
Gregory's love for acting came after he played Petruchio in a production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew when he was 12 years old.
Gregory 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 theater in modern life and what he felt was a trend toward fascism in the United States led him to abruptly abandon theater and leave the country. As described in the film My Dinner with Andre (1981), he traveled at director Jerzy Grotowski's invitation to Poland, where he developed several experimental theatrical events for private audiences. He spent several years in various esoteric communities, such as Findhorn, developing an interest and practice in New Age beliefs.
Gregory returned to the theater several times to direct small productions, usually for invited audiences. These included a long-running workshop of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (adapted by David Mamet) in New York, which was developed from 1990 to 1994 and featured Shawn and Julianne Moore. Though never publicly performed, a filmed rehearsal was released as Vanya on 42nd Street in 1994. Gregory also directed a radio production of Shawn's 1996 play The Designated Mourner in 2002.
1980s and 1990s
Gregory's best-known film performance is as the title character in My Dinner with Andre, directed by Louis Malle, in which he and Shawn, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, have a long conversation over dinner. They discuss Gregory's spiritual sojourn in Europe and his doubts about the future of theater and of Western civilization in general. Co-written by Gregory and Shawn, it was filmed over two weeks at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia, on a set designed to resemble the Café des Artistes in New York, and premiered at the 1981 Telluride Film Festival. Championed by critic Roger Ebert, the film won the award for Best American Film of 1981 at the 2nd Boston Society of Film Critics Awards; Gregory and Shawn won Best Screenplay for the film at the same ceremony.
Gregory appeared with Goldie Hawn in Protocol (1984). In 1988 he played the father in Some Girls. In 1993, he appeared in the movie Demolition Man. Other notable character actor roles he played include John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Reverend Spellgood in The Mosquito Coast (1986), and Dante in The Linguini Incident (1991).
2000s onward
Returning to theater, Gregory directed Shawn's play Grasses of a Thousand Colors, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2009. He next worked with Shawn on a new version of Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder. 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, Gregory directed Grasses of a Thousand Colors and The Designated Mourner, starring Shawn in a co-production of Theatre for a New Audience and The Public Theater in New York. A 2013 documentary about Gregory's life, Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner, was directed by his wife, Cindy Kleine. He and Kleine discussed it on the May 3, 2013, episode of Charlie Rose. After working on it for seven years,
Marriages and family
Gregory was first married to Mercedes "Chiquita" Nebelthau, a documentary filmmaker who died of cancer in 1992. In 2000, he married filmmaker Cindy Kleine; at the time, Kleine was 39 and Gregory was 63. They have lived in Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, since the early 2000s.