An Army brat, Paul Gross was born in Calgary, Alberta and was educated in England, Germany, Washington D.C. and Canada before earning a degree in Drama at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Following university, he performed extensively in Canadian regional theaters in addition to forging a writing career. His first play, The Deer and the Antelope Play, performed in Edmonton, won the Clifford E. Lee National Playwriting Award and the Alberta Cultural Playwriting Award (1982). His second play, The Dead of Winter, a Gothic tale of family life in the Badlands of Alberta, was a rousing success in its staging at the Toronto Free Theater.

Artistic Director John Neville then invited him to be playwright-in-residence at the Stratford Festival which, in co-operation with the Toronto Free Theatre, produced his Sprung Rhythm, a study of a megalomaniacal heart surgeon. This play was originally commissioned for the National Arts Center in Ottawa while Gross was the playwright-in-residence. This was a position he also held at The Grand Theater Company, under artistic director Robin Phillips. The Toronto Free Theater also produced Thunder, Perfect Mind, a sci-fi multi-media rock extravaganza, which ran for a year at Toronto's McLaughlin Planetarium.

For television he has written "In This Corner," an episode of CBC's For The Record series, which dealt with terrorism and its innocent victims and earned a Best TV Drama nomination at the 1986 Gemini Awards. He also wrote the widely-acclaimed drama Gross Misconduct, concerning the life of Brian Spencer which was produced by CBC and directed by Atom Egoyan (this years winner of the Cannes International Critics Prize for Exotica).

In between writing assignments, Gross occupies his time acting both on stage and screen. His acting talents were recognized with a Dora Award nomination for Romeo and Juliet (1985) and a Dora Award for Best Performance in his role in the critically-acclaimed North American premiere of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme (1988), which played at Toronto's Canadian Stage.

On television and film, his numerous starring appearances include Chasing Rainbows (CBC), Getting Married in Buffalo Jump, Cold Comfort (Canadian Features/1990), Buried On Sunday (Alliance/1992), Aspen Extreme (Hollywood Pictures/1992), and Tales of the City (PBS Mini-series/1993). >