November 19, 2020

André Gregory

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes renowned theatre director and writer ANDRÉ GREGORY for a discussion of his autobiography This Is Not My Memoir. He will be joined in conversation by actress and activist CYNTHIA NIXON.

Details

This is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theatre director, writer, and actor. For the first time, Gregory shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This is Not My Memoir includes fantastic and fantastical stories that take the reader from wartime Paris to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde theaters to monasteries in India. Along the way we meet Jerzy Grotowski, Helene Weigel, Gregory Peck, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, Wallace Shawn, and many other larger-than-life personalities.

This is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between Gregory and Todd London who together create a portrait of an artist confronting his later years. Here, too, are the reflections of a man who only recently learned how to love. What does it mean to create art in a world that often places little value on the process of creating it? And what does it mean to confront the process of aging when your greatest work of art may well be your own life?

About Author(s)

André Gregory has been directing theater in New York for more than half a century. He has collaborated on film versions of his theater productions with Wallace Shawn, Louis Malle, and Jonathan Demme. Gregory, Shawn, and Malle created the now-legendary My Dinner with André. Gregory is also an actor, a writer, a teacher, and a painter. 

Cynthia Nixon is an Emmy, Tony and Grammy Award-winner who has been acting professionally since the age of 12. Best known as Miranda Hobbes in HBO's celebrated series Sex and the City, Nixon can currently be seen starring in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Ratched, and she is in production on HBO's The Gilded Age, a series created by Downtown Abbey's Julian Fellowes. A lifelong New Yorker, she has been a longtime activist for better funding for public schools, abortion rights, and LGBTQ equality. In 2018 Nixon ran for Governor of New York State, successfully placing issues of racial, economic and gender inequality front and center, and receiving half a million votes.