Born in Princeton, educated at Princeton Country Day, graced with Cuyler Princeton ancestors and relatives dating back to 1881 — his father was a member of the Class of 1924 — it almost seems that Grenny was born to be a Tiger. And so he became, after Groton in 1956. And though he wasn’t born to the theater, he immersed himself in it from his earliest days to the end of his life.

At Princeton, Grenny majored in English, dined at Ivy, and dove into Theatre Intime and Triangle. In those, he wrote, acted, directed, stage-handed, and did whatever else the theater needed. After graduation, he undertook a career that ultimately included acting in New York and regional theater, television, and movies; directing and producing in school, nonprofit, and commercial venues; teaching theater at the secondary-school and college levels; and two longer interludes to earn a master’s degree at Sarah Lawrence College in 1973 and a Ph.D. at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, U.K., in 1985.

Grenny never achieved the heights of the theater, but he was justifiably proud of the breadth and depth of his career. Never married, he said that his itinerant life made the lovelies, and their mothers, “run for cover.” Grenny enjoyed a host of friends and his close, extended family. He died Feb. 1, 2020, of complications of dementia.

Undergraduate Class of 1960