Gregor Collins is an American author, speaker, producer and actor, most known for writing The Accidental Caregiver, a memoir about the three years he spent with Maria Altmann. [1] [2] [3]
Gregor Collins is an American author, speaker, producer and actor, most known for writing The Accidental Caregiver, a memoir about the three years he spent with Maria Altmann. [1] [2] [3]
Collins spent his childhood and adolescent years in the Washington, D.C. area and attended Centreville High School in Northern Virginia, where he played on his school golf team. Collins subsequently received a golf grant to Ohio Wesleyan University, played for a semester, then transferred to Miami University for two more semesters before taking a year off to work as a production assistant for the television series World Business Review with Caspar Weinberger. He completed his undergraduate studies at Florida State University, where he majored in Media Production. [4]
Collins moved to Los Angeles in 2000 to pursue a career in entertainment. He worked his way into producing various reality television shows such as Blind Date, Celebrity Mole: Yucatán , Girls Gone Wild , Ripley's Believe it or Not , E! at the Emmy Awards , Welcome to Myrtle Manor and Counting Cars . [5] [6] In 2004 he began to pursue professional acting, eventually performing on stage, in television and in independent films, landing lead roles in the indie feature Night Before the Wedding and the improvised feature Goodbye Promise, which the Los Angeles Times called a "simple, richly emotional look at a failed actor's introspective last days in Hollywood." [7]
In October 2014 Collins moved to the Murray Hill, Manhattan section of New York, living with and serving as a caregiver to Austrian painter Ruth Rogers-Altmann while he prepared a stage production of his book The Accidental Caregiver , about his experience caring for Rogers-Altmann's cousin Maria Altmann.
Collins has written essays about Ruth and Maria for The Guardian , Focus , Huffington Post and others, and has been a regular contributor to CinemaEditor since 2013. [8] [9]
In 2012 Collins released the memoir The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann , detailing his chance meeting and unusual bond with Jewish émigré Maria Altmann, [10] culminating in her death in early 2011. [11] [12] [13]
Collins travels around the world sharing his experience as Altmann's caregiver, his keynote speeches often sponsored by the Women's International Zionist Organization. [14] [15]
The Accidental Caregiver Part 2 was published in 2020 by Balboa Press, a division of Hay House, and follows Collins' life after Maria's death and his accidental speaking tour across Australia with WIZO. As of 2024, Collins is working on a third and final installment of the caregiver series. [16]
The Accidental Caregiver stageplay premiered at the Robert Moss Theater, as part of Playwrights Horizons, in New York City on January 26, 2015, and was directed by British theatre director Alice Kornitzer. [17] The play also had a staged reading at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York on June 25, 2015, which was directed by Collins. Actors Christian Scheider and Rochelle Slovin read the parts of Gregor and Maria, respectively. [18] [19]
In November 2015 Collins wrote the Oscar Wilde-inspired dark comedy Pentonville for the Manhattan Repertory Theatre in New York, [20] which was directed by Jonathan Stuart Cerullo. [21] In June 2016 Collins created, co-wrote and co-produced the black comedy series Stories for Ali Farahnakian and the People's Improv Theater in New York. [22] [23]
In January 2017 Collins' play The Secret World Inside Me was developed and performed as a staged reading at the IATI Theater in New York. [24]
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | Passions | Bartender | TV-series |
| 2005 | Creepies 2 | Jeff Quest | Film |
| 2005 | Manhater | Jackson Botero | Film |
| 2005 | The Witch's Sabbath | Derek | Film |
| 2006 | The World's Astonishing News | Prison Guard | TV-series |
| 2006 | Blood Legend | Clark | Film |
| 2007 | Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide | Bouncer | TV-Series |
| 2007 | Ocean's Thirteen | Stickman | Film |
| 2007 | Loveless in Los Angeles | Peter | Film |
| 2009 | Night Before the Wedding | Bronco | Film |
| 2009 | Chloe and Keith's Wedding | Zach | Film |
| 2011 | Urban Jungle Dating Dilemmas | Matt | TV-Series |
| 2012 | Goodbye Promise | Matt | Film |
F. Murray Abraham is an American actor. Known for his roles on stage and screen, he has received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award as well as nominations for a BAFTA Award, four Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award. He came to prominence for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri in the drama film Amadeus (1984) for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor.
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Republic of Austria v. Altmann, 541 U.S. 677 (2004), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, or FSIA, applies retroactively to acts prior to its enactment in 1976.
"Edelweiss" is a show tune from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music. It is named after the edelweiss, a white flower found high in the Alps. The song was created for the 1959 Broadway production of The Sound of Music, as a song for the character Captain Georg von Trapp. In the musical, Captain von Trapp and his family sing this song during the concert near the end of Act II. It is a statement of Austrian patriotism in the face of the pressure put upon him to join the navy of Nazi Germany following the Anschluss. It is also Captain von Trapp's subliminal goodbye to his beloved homeland, using the flower as a symbol of his loyalty to Austria. In the 1965 film adaptation, the song is also sung by the Captain earlier in the film when he rediscovers music with his children.
Theodore Raymond Knight is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Dr. George O'Malley on the ABC medical drama television series Grey's Anatomy, which earned him a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2007.
Maria Altmann was an Austrian-American Jewish refugee from Austria, who fled her home country after it was annexed to the Nazi’s Third Reich. She is noted for her ultimately successful legal campaign to reclaim from the Government of Austria five family-owned paintings by the artist Gustav Klimt that were stolen by the Nazis during World War II.
The Sound of Music is a 1965 American musical drama film produced and directed by Robert Wise from a screenplay written by Ernest Lehman, and starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, with Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Charmian Carr, and Eleanor Parker. The film is an adaptation of the 1959 stage musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and a book by Lindsay and Crouse. It is based on the 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria von Trapp and is set in Salzburg, Austria. It is a fictional retelling of her experiences as governess to seven children, her eventual marriage with their father Captain Georg von Trapp, and their escape during the Anschluss in 1938.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is an oil painting on canvas, with gold leaf, by Gustav Klimt, completed between 1903 and 1907. The portrait was commissioned by the sitter's husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese and Jewish banker and sugar producer. The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and displayed at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. The portrait is the final and most fully representative work of Klimt's golden phase. It was the first of two depictions of Adele by Klimt—the second was completed in 1912; these were two of several works by the artist that the family owned.
Adele Bloch-Bauer was a Viennese socialite, salon hostess, and patron of the arts from Austria-Hungary, married to sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. A Jewish woman, she is most well known for being the subject of two of artist Gustav Klimt's paintings: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, and the fate of the paintings during and after the Nazi Holocaust. She has been called "the Austrian Mona Lisa."
Legs Diamond is a musical with a book by Harvey Fierstein and Charles Suppon based on the Warner Brothers film The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), with a screenplay by Joseph Landon. The music and lyrics are by Peter Allen, who starred as the title character in the Broadway production.
Raoul Aslan was an Austrian theater actor of Greek-Armenian ancestry.
Ewan Gordon McGregor is a Scottish actor. His accolades include a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award. In 2013, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to drama and charity.
Woman in Gold is a 2015 biographical drama film directed by Simon Curtis and written by Alexi Kaye Campbell. The film stars Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Katie Holmes, Tatiana Maslany, Max Irons, Charles Dance, Elizabeth McGovern, and Jonathan Pryce.
Conrad Wayne Ricamora-Jensen is an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Oliver Hampton on the ABC television series How to Get Away with Murder (2014–20). As a stage actor, he is noted for his roles in the original Off-Broadway musicals Here Lies Love and Soft Power, which premiered in 2013 and 2019, respectively. He made his Broadway debut in the 2015 revival of The King and I.
Bernhard Altmann was an Austrian textile manufacturer whose business was stolen and whose family's art collection was looted by Nazis because of their Jewish origins. He introduced cashmere wool to North America on a mass scale in 1947.
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The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann is a 2012 memoir by Gregor Collins, recounting the three years he was a caregiver for Maria Altmann, as well as a stageplay, which premiered in New York City in 2015.
Jonathan Stuart Cerullo is an American director and choreographer, executive producer, and former performer. Cerullo is known for his work on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally. He has also worked in circus, film, and television.
Rochelle Slovin is an American stage actress, and founding director of Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, New York City, which she led for 30 years, from 1981 until 2011. A native New Yorker, Slovin was educated at Cornell University and the Columbia Business School. She began her career in the 1960s as a performer in New York’s avant-garde theater, appearing often at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club and other off-off-Broadway venues.
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