Spalding GRAY ~~ Lorraine HANSBERRY ~~ Stuart JEWELL

SPALDING GRAY ~ 1941 - 2004 ~~ On March 8, the body of self-effacing monologist and actor Spalding Gray was pulled from the East River two months after he disappeared. Gray's best work offered a sublime mix of personal confessions and politically charged insights. He mingled performance art with comedy in acclaimed monologues like "Swimming to Cambodia" and "It's a Slippery Slope." Gray was known to have been deeply troubled and had attempted suicide before. His life took a sudden downturn when he suffered a frightening head-on car crash during a 2001 vacation in Ireland to celebrate his 60th birthday. He suffered a cracked skull, a broken hip and nerve damage to one foot and although he recovered physically, the incident left him traumatized. He was last seen leaving his Manhattan apartment on January 10 and witnesses had reported a man fitting Gray's description look despondent and upset on the Staten Island Ferry that evening. He is survived by his spouse, Kathleen and two sons, Forrest and Theo. Editor's Note: For more on Spalding Gray, see my blog tribute at www.ripspaldingray.blogspot.com ~~ LORRAINE HANSBERRY ~ 1930 - 1965 ~ Born in Chicago, American playwright Lorraine Hansberry's parents were civil rights activists and moved into a white neighborhood when she was eight years old. They were met by an angry mob. A civil trial ensued and it was this experience that formed the basis for her most successful 1959 play, "A Raisin in the Sun." Hansberry died in 1965 from cancer and her friend James Baldwin wrote about the last time he saw her: "...she was seated, talking, dressed all in black, wearing a handsome wide, black hat, thin and radiant. I knew she had been ill but I didn't know, then, how seriously. I said, 'Lorraine, baby, you look beautiful, how in the world do you do it?' She was leaving and she turned and smiled that smile and said, 'It helps to develop a serious illness, Jimmy!' and waved and disappeared." She wrote in 'Raisin:' "We have decided to move into our house because my father earned it for us brick by brick. We don't want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes and we will try to be good neighbors. And that's all we got to say about that." ~~ STUART JEWELL ~ 1913 - 1997 ~~ Celebrated cinematographer was best known for his time-lapse photography in Walt Disney's landmark nature movie, "The Living Desert," which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1953. A man of almost obsessive patience, he once spent virtually every daylight hour for more than three weeks perched in an oak tree near a populous beehive in a hooded hollow of the tree. A man of intense wonder, he had a boundless curiosity that took him and his cameras around the world several times. Although something of a loner, he was far from a recluse. He outlived two wives and almost ran his third ragged. For all his interest in nature, Mr. Jewell had developed a recent obsession with steam locomotives. Recognizing that the magnificent engines were an endangered species that would soon disappear he tracked them down and filmed them throughout the world, including a memorable wintertime trip to China where he worked outdoors in subfreezing weather. A man so at one with his work that he rarely went a day without filming something and routinely shot tens of thousands of feet a film a year. Although he and his wife enjoyed the friendships they made on their foreign trips, they rarely had time to socialize at home. It would be getting on toward evening, his wife recalled and her husband, who had filmed dramatic sunsets all over the world, would be drawn to the beach one more time. "If we don't go," he would say, "we might miss a killer sunset." Mr. Jewell is survived by his wife and died in Costa Mesa, Calif. of cancer.