Academy Award, Tony Award, and Golden Globe Award-winning performer, Joel Grey’s early passion for flowers and plants helped form a lifelong love for nature’s beauty. From the tender age of just 10 years old, Grey recalls a childhood spent poring over seed catalogs searching for the perfect flower he hoped to someday nurture with love.
Growing up adjoining an undeveloped parcel of land just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, Grey enjoyed the magic and splendor of flora while exploring this dark and somehow inviting mini-forest. Searching through weeds and tall grasses, his prize was occasionally his all-time-favorite, a lily of the valley in full bloom.
Today, Grey is a favorite of his local New York City flower market where he can be found regularly indulging his passion. Grey celebrates the fascinating and unique sexuality of these flowers with intimate views of their petals, pistils, and stamens. ‘The Flower Whisperer’ is Grey’s personal testament to the mysterious sexual universe of flowers.
With a deep-rooted love for painterly abstraction, Grey’s observations of tulips, roses, poppies, calla lilies, ranunculuses, daffodils, sunflowers, hydrangeas, daisies, and of course Grey’s revered lily of the valley among many others, echo the feeling of the watercolors he has always yearned to create.
In a theatre career that was launched in the early 1950s, Joel Grey’s credits include Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (Roundabout), “Anything Goes,” “Wicked,” “Chicago,” “George M!” (Tony Award nom.), and “Cabaret” (Tony Award). He was Ned Weeks in the Public Theatre’s original off-Broadway production of Larry Kramer’s seminal play, “The Normal Heart,” in 1986, and co-directed the Tony Award-winning Broadway premiere in 2011. Film credits include “Cabaret” (Academy Award), “Buffalo Bill and the Indians,” “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” “Dancer in the Dark,” “The Seven Percent Solution,” and many more. Joel is also an internationally exhibited photographer with four published books, ‘Pictures I Had to Take’ (2003), ‘Looking Hard at Unexamined Things’ (2006), ‘1.3: Images From My Phone’ (2009), and ‘The Billboard Papers’ (2013). His work is part of the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art. His memoir, ‘Master of Ceremonies,’ was released in 2016 (Flatiron Press).
He directed the critically acclaimed “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish which is currently playing at Stage 42.
‘The Flower Whisperer’ will hit bookstores May 28th
