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Playwright, wit and smoking diarist Simon Gray dies of cancer
Anna Davis7 Aug 2008
The playwright and diarist Simon Gray died today aged 71.
The author was diagnosed with lung cancer last year and wrote of his love of smoking.
His play Cell Mates became frontpage news in 1995, though for the rather unwelcome reason that actor Stephen Fry - who also starred in the televised version of Gray's play The Common Pursuit - ran away from the production and his co-star Rik Mayall after suffering a breakdown. Mr Gray wrote about the experience in another memoir called Fat Chance.
Throughout his life he wrote 30 plays for stage and TV as well as five novels.
However, recently he had become celebrated for his diaries which appeared in three volumes starting with The Smoking Diaries in 2004 and ending with The Last Cigarette this year, which led him to be hailed as one of the best memoirists of his era. But as well as smoking, he wrote about his battle with alcoholism.
Mr Gray, who was educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, also worked as a lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London.
He leaves a wife Victoria (née Rothschild) and a son and a daughter by his first marriage to Beryl Mary Kevern.
In his diaries Mr Gray spoke candidly about the many disasters in his life - his shattered health and chaotic finances. He lost his house in Highgate in 1997 when he left his first wife for Victoria and the couple lived together in Holland Park until his death.
For much of his adult life he drank three bottles of champagne and large slugs of whisky every day. He said he stopped drinking whisky around 10 years ago but compensated by increasing his champagne intake to four bottles.
He eventually gave up drinking in 1997 after his doctor warned him never to drink again.
His book The Smoking Diaries begins on his sixty-fifth birthday when he said he needed to get in touch with his "inner adult."
His literary agent Judy Daish said: "He was an absolutely wonderful, brilliant man and writer. I worked with him for 31 years. He was an absolutely marvellous man to work with. He had a wonderful wit, humour and humanity about him."
Evening Standard theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh said: "Simon Gray captured, as no other playwright of his generation, a sense of the professional middle classes beset by life's problems.
"A comedic vein ran right through the course of his brilliant career, conveyed best of all in the series of autobiographical memoirs, which some people reckon offer the sharpest insight into the wheeling dealing world of theatre and showbusiness. Delighted by regular infusions of champagne, cigarettes and bright company he was the essence of individuality and defiance in the sight of grey mundanity."
