The Accidental Caregiver
How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann
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So I went to that audition unable to shake this girl from my head. Meeting her was like being in Paris for the first time, or eating peanut butter and chocolate ice cream on an empty stomach. It was a game-changer: I was officially in love with someone other than myself. And though I didn’t realize it then, I would never leave her. I was hers. Forever. But even in those first magical moments in that Beverly Hills kitchen, there are things we would never know. We never knew we would spend the next three years together intimately—that we would be transported to Vienna in its heyday, and that we would be forced to leave it behind to escape the Nazis; that we would barely make it to Holland; then to England; then to Massachusetts; then to California—where we’d work, raise a family, and live out the rest of our lives in Los Angeles. And we would never know it would all end at her funeral, where I would be pulled aside and told I was the last great love of her life. No, we would never know the heights we would reach together before it ended. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For one, I was an actor, not a caregiver, and, frankly, I needed an old lady like I needed a hole in the head…
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About the Book
“From the most unlikely of unlikely romances comes a deeply felt, touching, humorous exploration of what love and age mean in today’s world. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.”
— Stan Evans, Emmy-award winning writer, and author of Box of Mustaches
When thirty-two-year-old actor Gregor Collins reluctantly interviewed for a job as a caregiver more out of a favor to a friend - he had no idea his life was about to change forever. Seconds into the chance meeting in 2008 with, it would turn out, a world-renowned Holocaust refugee named Maria Altmann, there was an unexplainable magic in the air - it felt as if they had already met. And Collins was suddenly thrown into a situation with which he had never before been confronted: caring for someone other than himself. Gregor offers us a personal and unprecedented look at Maria over the three intimate years he cared for her - her thrilling escape from the Nazis, her fight and subsequent win in the landmark Supreme Court Case to return original Gustav Klimt artwork that belonged to her family in Austria, and the extraordinary people she met along the way. But the real heart of the story transcends mere historical facts. Through a refreshingly raw portrayal of their unlikely and unbreakable bond, imbued with humorous, candid anecdotes about his mercurial relationship with Hollywood, Gregor takes us on a deeply emotional journey of how he opened up his heart to a 92-year-old woman in need - and in turn experienced the love he had been searching for his entire life.
About the Author
Gregor is a writer, actor and producer living in New York. He grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and holds a BA in Media Production from Florida State University. Starting his career in Los Angeles producing reality TV, he shifted gears to acting, performing on stage, on television, and in independent feature films. His writing and acting have been featured in The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Publishers Weekly, Cinema Editor Magazine, and on Off and Off-Off Broadway stages across New York. The stageplay based on his book The Accidental Caregiver was performed in New York at the Robert Moss Theater in 2015, and The Austrian Cultural Forum New York in 2016. Gregor travels around the world as a keynote speaker to talk about his book and his three years caring for Altmann, working often with WIZO, the Women’s International Zionist Organization.