Simon Gray, 71; British Playwright and Memoirist

Celebrated British playwright Simon Gray, known as much for his lacerating dark comedies as his outrageously self-castigating memoirs, died of lung cancer Aug. 6 in London. He was 71.

Mr. Gray began smoking heavily at 7 and for much of his life sustained a whiskey and three-bottle-a-day champagne habit that he said "somehow liberated" his writing. He quit drinking in 1997, he said, after passing out during a toast.

His behavior informed the rumpled restlessness of his characters. He created memorable sketches of decay and self-absorption in such plays as "Butley" (1971), "Otherwise Engaged" (1975) and "Quartermaine's Terms" (1981).

Over time, his works became more stripped of plot to emphasize character and a general mood of dissipation. But the plays remained literate and scalding examinations of a frustrated intellectual class he knew well from his years of university lecturing.

Throughout, he was concerned with the breakdown in human communications. It was a theme explored memorably -- and viciously -- in "Otherwise Engaged" when a cultured publisher who wishes only to spend his evening listening to a new recording of Richard Wagner's opera "Parsifal" hangs up on an old school chum contemplating suicide.

He enjoyed fruitful professional partnerships with actor Alan Bates and fellow dramatist Harold Pinter, who directed many of Mr. Gray's plays. He considered them ideal interpreters of his work when he was not falling out with them.

A pathologist's son, Simon James Holliday Gray was born Oct. 21, 1936, in Hayling Island, England. After the British declaration of war in 1939, his chain-smoking mother took him and a younger brother (who later died of alcoholism) to live with relatives in Montreal.

She then told the boys she was off for a minute to buy milk, instead vanishing back to England for the duration of the war.

Mr. Gray grew to loathe his troubled and at times abusive relatives in Montreal. He found little refuge in school, where, according to his memoir "The Smoking Diaries," he was molested by teachers and beaten up by students.

He developed an energetic cigarette habit and a passion for comic books, soft-core pornography and petty thievery by the time he returned to England in 1945. Sporting a crew cut and a streetwise gaze, he wrote of being a shocking sight to his parents.

"We went forth as two little English poodles and came back as two North American brutes," he later said.

While continuing his education at what he called "a seedy prep school" in London, he was caught perpetrating a scam to defraud London's subway system using Georgian coins and was sent before a judge in juvenile court.