I've thought for quite some time that Gray, in making the private, intimate, interior stuff of a life into the public content of art, was way ahead of the curve. For better or worse. The worse being, I think, that most of us are thoroughly amateur alchemists: not quite interesting or talented enough to successfully transform our lives into art.
update: I stumbled upon this interview with Gray in which, while discussing playing a suicidal character in the film King of the Hill, he seems to forecast his own suicide, right down to leaving no mess for anyone to have to clean up. Here's the excerpt:
io: When you saw yourself on the screen in King of the Hill, did watching your character commit suicide have an effect on you personally?
SG: Yeah, at the time Steven Soderbergh cast me in that movie, I was having a lot of suicide fantasies. I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave. Steven said I was his only choice for that role because he had read Impossible Vacation, which was about a man ruled by regret.
I was taken by the fact that the character in King of the Hill had chosen cutting his wrists as the method of suicide, because that was one of my fantasies when I was in Taos. I thought that I would take Quaaludes, take a razor out to the hot tub with me and cut my wrists. But then I thought the Quaaludes would make me feel so good that I would end up not doing it [strange, sad laugh].
So, this role was so powerful. To have my wrists made up for two hours, and five hours of setting up the blood -- I was a witness to it for all this time, and I realized the old cliche of what a mess [suicide] is to leave for someone else to find -- what a stupid, passive-aggressive, piggish thing to do to someone.
After we finished the suicide scene, I walked back to the hotel with the make-up and dried blood. During this three-minute walk no one noticed except for this bum who ran from me. I got to the hotel and the people at the check out counter said "Oh, gross," but that was it, because they knew I was in a film. I needed to have a reaction from someone. So I walked into the hotel drugstore and there was a woman about my mother's age when she committed suicide, filling out prescriptions. I held up my wrists and said [in a whiny voice], "Do you have anything for my wounds?" She said, "My, God, what did you do?" I answered I'd cut my wrists and she went into shock and said, "Well, we have Mercurochrome." She actually said "Mercurochrome" and she frantically began to look for it.
It was a vicious thing to do. I asked her if she watched Candid Camera, which put her at ease. I told her she wasn't on it, that I was an actor and it was make-up. I realized that I was enacting a reversal of my mother's suicide. I had turned to my mother and said, "Look -- what does it feel like to have your son commit suicide?"
