Gray, Simon James Holliday

Gray, Simon James Holliday (1936- ), English dramatist, prolific writer of sardonic comedies set in the worlds of academia and publishing. The son of a pathologist, Simon Gray was born at Hayling Island, Hampshire, on October 21, 1936, and educated at Westminster School; Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia; and Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1965 to 1985 he was an English lecturer at Queen Mary College, London.

His debut stage play, the black comedy Wise Child (1967), starred Alec Guinness as a professional criminal who takes to transvestism in order to dodge the police. His first major success was the play Butley (1971; film 1974), which depicts a day in the life of a brilliant but self-lacerating English lecturer as his life disintegrates around him, originally played by Alan Bates in one of his most memorable performances. Bates became a regular in Gray’s plays, as the emotionally barren publisher Simon Hench in Otherwise Engaged (1975) and its sequel Simply Disconnected (1996), as well as in Stage Struck (1979), Life Support (1997), and the television dramas Plaintiffs and Defendants (1975), Two Sundays (1975), and Unnatural Pursuits (1991). Also among Gray’s 30 or so plays are Quartermaine's Terms (1981; televised 1987), set in a Cambridge language school; The Common Pursuit (1984; televised 1992), about a group of undergraduates who set up a literary magazine inspired by F. R. Leavis; and Hidden Laughter (1990), in which a London couple’s escape to a rural idyll turns sour. In 1995 the West End production of Gray’s Cell Mates, about the double-agent George Blake, was suddenly cancelled after the disappearance of its star Stephen Fry, an experience Gray later wrote about in his journal Fat Chance (1995). His other theatre journals are An Unnatural Pursuit and Other Pieces (1985), How's that for Telling 'em, Fat Lady? (1988), and Enter a Fox (2001). In Gray’s subsequent plays he drew on experiences from his own childhood (The Late Middle Classes, 1999) and the life of his brother, who died from alcoholism (Japes, 2001). His later plays also include The Old Masters (2004), about the 1930s art business, and Little Nell, staged at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2007, about the relationship between Charles Dickens and the actress Ellen Ternan. The Smoking Diaries (2004), The Year of the Jouncer (2006), and The Last Cigarette (2008) comprise a trilogy of memoirs.

Gray’s work for television and film includes the mystery After Pilkington and an adaptation of the evocative J. L. Carr novel A Month in the Country (both 1987). Among his several novels are Colmain (1963), Little Portia (1967), and Breaking Hearts (1997). He was made a CBE in 2005.