Simon Gray

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 1957, he received a B.A. from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia; and, in 1961, another B.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1965, he was appointed a lecturer in English at Queen Mary College, London.He married his first wife, Beryl Kevern, in 1965; they had two children, a son, Benjamin, and a daughter, Lucy, and were divorced in 1997. During their marriage, he had an eight-year affair with another Queen Mary lecturer, Victoria Katherine Rothschild (b. 1953), a daughter of Sir Nathaniel Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild; 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.Suffering from both lung cancer and prostate cancer and related ailments at the time of his death, he died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, on 7 August 2008, at the age of 71.