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British writer and academic

Simon James Holliday Gray (21 October 1936 – 7 August 2008) was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to five published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film and television and became well known for the self deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.

Simon James Holliday Gray was born on 21 October 1936 on Hayling Island, in Hampshire, England to James Gray and his wife Barbara (née Holliday). His father, who later became a pathologist, worked on the island as GP. In 1939, during World War II, when he was three years old, Simon and his elder brother Nigel were evacuated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to live in "a house where his grandfather and [his grandfather's] alcoholic wife were attended upon by a younger aunt"; in 1945, when he was nearly 10, he returned to England, where he was educated at Westminster School, in London. In 1965, he was appointed a lecturer in English at Queen Mary College, London. in 1997, after his divorce, they married, living together in west London, until his death. In 2004 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to drama and literature.

When he was still in his 20s, he began his writing career as a novelist with Colmain, published by Faber and Faber in 1963. His career in drama began when he adapted one of his own short stories, The Caramel Crisis, for television. He subsequently wrote a number of plays for, amongst others, The Wednesday Play and Play for Today BBC anthology series, frequently in collaboration with the producer Kenith Trodd. Gray wrote 40 plays and screenplays for the stage, television, and film and eight volumes of memoirs based on his diaries. As with Butley (1971) and Otherwise Engaged (1975), whose London productions and films both starred Bates, and Quartermaine's Terms (1981), starring Fox, Gray "often returned to the subject of the lives and trials of educated intellectuals." Gray's play about George Blake, Cell Mates (1995), starring Rik Mayall, Stephen Fry and Simon Ward, attracted media attention when Stephen Fry suffered a nervous breakdown and abruptly "fled to Bruges" after the third West End performance, thus leaving the show without its lead actor. In August 2008, shortly before his death, he attracted further press attention with his criticism of the Royal National Theatre's "cowardice" in dealing with the subject of radical Islam.

Gray's final volume of diaries, Coda, "so named because it rounds off the trilogy of 'Smoking Diaries' (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette) a meditation on death, or rather dying, an account of living on borrowed time," was published posthumously by Faber and Faber and Granta in November 2008. From 8 to 12 December 2008, in five 15 minute episodes, actor Toby Stephens read from this "candid and darkly comic account of coming to terms with terminal cancer" for BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. Simon Gray: A Celebration, directed by Harry Burton, who directed Gray's last stage production in Spring 2008 (Quartermaine's Terms at Theatre Royal, Windsor), was held at the Comedy Theatre, in London, on 15 March 2009. A production entitled The Last Cigarette, based on Gray's and Hugh Whitemore's adaptation of the three volumes of his memoirs called The Smoking Diaries and directed by Richard Eyre, opened at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, England, in April 2009. The production, with Felicity Kendal, Nicholas Le Prevost, and Jasper Britton, then transferred to the Trafalgar Studios, in London's West End,

An official web site was launched in October 2009. The Late Middle Classes finally received its London premiere on 27 May 2010 at the Donmar Warehouse in London, directed by David Leveaux and starring Helen McCrory, Eleanor Bron, Peter Sullivan and Robert Glenister. The original production of the play, directed by Harold Pinter, was prevented from reaching its intended West End theatre by a musical about a boy band. Gray's experience of this production is the subject of his diary Enter a Fox. In May–June 2014 In the Vale of Health, consisting of three unseen plays and one revival—Japes, Michael, Japes Too and Missing Dates—was performed at the Hampstead Theatre, London, directed by Tamara Harvey and starring Gethin Anthony, Jamie Ballard, Imogen Doel, Tom Mothersdale and Laura Rees. The plays tell the story, from different perspectives, of two brothers who fall in love with the same woman.

The Definitive Simon Gray. In 4 vols. London: Faber, 1992–1994. Vol. 1: Butley and Other Plays (1992). Vol. 2: Otherwise Engaged and Other Plays (1992). Vol. 3 (1993). Vol. 4 (1994). Key Plays. Introd. Harold Pinter. London: Faber, 2002. (Includes: Butley; Otherwise Engaged; Close of Play; Quartermaine's Terms; and The Late Middle Classes.)