Gregory was born André William Josefowitz in Paris, France, in 1934 to Russian Jewish parents.[2][3] His family fled from France to London in 1939 before moving to the United States, where he grew up in Los Angeles.[4][5] The family subsequently changed its surname from Josefowitz to Gregory.[5] As an adult, Gregory discovered that his father was probably a Nazi sympathizer, as he represented Russia in Germany for IG Farben, the German chemical conglomerate that produced the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi concentration camps.[6][5]
Gregory's parents were extremely wealthy, and as a child Gregory spent summers in Westwood, Los Angeles, in a house on Sunset Boulevard rented to them by writer Thomas Mann.[5] He recalls house parties where celebrities they met through Marlene Dietrich (whom they knew from their time in Berlin) were present, including the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, and Errol Flynn (who had an affair with Gregory's mother).[5] Gregory has called his parents "wretched, negligent and self-absorbed, petty and often mean" and his father "the most frightening person in my life"; he spent much of his adulthood in therapy.[5][7]
In 1964, Gregory was hired as artistic director of a new company in Philadelphia, Theatre of the Living Arts. He ran the company for three years, garnering national recognition, until leaving in 1967 after a conflict with the board of directors over the controversial premiere of Rochelle Owens's Beclch.[8]
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.[9][10] Championed by critic Roger Ebert,[11] 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.
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.[12] 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.
Gregory was first married to Mercedes "Chiquita" Nebelthau, a documentary filmmaker who died of cancer in 1992.[6] They had two children.[17] In 2000, he married filmmaker Cindy Kleine; at the time, Kleine was 39 and Gregory was 63.[18] They have lived in Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, since the early 2000s.[6]
