Simon Gray

Published Friday 22 August 2008 at 14:00 by Patrick Newley

The author of 40 plays, television plays and screenplays, and five novels, Simon Gray was a key figure in 20th-century British drama. His bitingly comic plays Butley, Otherwise Engaged and Quartermaine’s Terms were all major West End and Broadway successes, and in recent years he earned notoriety for his series of hilarious diaries, The Smoking Diaries and The Last Cigarette.

A rakish figure who claimed to have consumed three bottles of champagne a day for years, Gray was steeped in the academic world and nearly everything he wrote was written when he was a lecturer in drama, poetry and English literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He once said: “Teaching is my bloody life.”

Simon James Holliday Gray was born on October 21, 1936, in Hayling Island, Hampshire. He was educated at Canada’s Dalhousie University and the University of Cambridge. Universities provided the setting for several of his best-known plays, including Butley and The Common Pursuit.

His success began with Wise Child in 1967, a story about two male criminals on the run. He made his first foray into drama when he discovered that the BBC intended to make one of his short stories into a radio play - and would pay the scriptwriter more than him. He turned Wise Child into a stage play, which was a West End success in 1967 with Alec Guinness.

Butley opened in the West End in 1971, directed by Harold Pinter and starring Alan Bates, two men with whom Gray would work frequently during his career. Butley won awards worldwide and was fiilmed in 1974. Bates was highly praised in the central role of Butley and subsequently appeared in Otherwise Engaged (1975), the comedy thriller Stage Struck (1979), Quartermaine’s Terms (1981) and Life Support (1997). Gray’s other successes included Molly (1977), starring Billie Whitelaw, Close of Play (1979), which featured Michael Redgrave, and The Common Pursuit (1988). More recent works included Hidden Laughter (1990) and Japes (2001).

Many of his best-known plays plumbed the territory he called “the world I know best”. “Most of one’s friends tend to be publishers, schoolteachers, students or actors,” he said.

He achieved notoriety of a different kind in 1995, when Stephen Fry vanished three days into the West End run of his play Cell Mates. “When the history of the stage is written, Cell Mates will become the most famous play I ever wrote,” he later noted. He turned the misadventure into a book, Fat Chance.

Many of his plays have had successful recent revivals, Butley on Broadway in 2006 with Nathan Lane in the title role, and The Common Pursuit was staged at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory earlier this year.

Gray always started writing with a scrap of dialogue. He once said: “A character in a room says something and I hope someone else will say something.”

The author battled alcoholism and once admitted smoking 65 cigarettes a day. He was diagnosed with prostrate cancer in 2002. His drinking came to an end when he was admitted to intensive care in 1997. He claimed he had no regrets. “I had wonderful times drinking,” he said. “And I wrote a lot of my plays when I was pretty well drunk.”

Gray was appointed CBE in 2004, for his services to literature and drama. He died of lung cancer on August 6, aged 71. His wife survives him, with a son and daughter from his first marriage.

Paying tribute, writer Howard Jacobson said: “Simon was the very best of writers, as good as writers get. His plays are being rediscovered. We’re relishing the language.”

Rik Mayall, who appeared in two of Gray’s plays, Cell Mates and Common Pursuit, said: “Simon was such a strong and powerful writer, director and friend. It’s a great loss.”