Simon Gray, 71; British Playwright and Memoirist

Before the magistrate, he later wrote, he gave a rousing speech he likened to school performances in which he displayed the "cultivated but not disturbing originality that wins scholarships."

He was a 1957 graduate of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, then worked toward a doctorate at Trinity College at Cambridge University before starting a long teaching career at Queen Mary's College of the University of London.

Despite his reputation for excess, he was known as a literary perfectionist who drafted upward of 30 times before he was satisfied. He produced a handful of novels, including a satiric look at academe ("Simple People," 1964).

His first major stage play was "Wise Child," staged in London's West End in 1967 with Alec Guinness in a comic-macabre tale of a criminal's sexual masquerade to evade the police.

He won over mass audiences and many reviewers with "Butley," about the fateful day in the life of a burned-out college professor confronted with sexual and professional crises. The play was nominated for a Tony Award when it reached Broadway in 1972, and Bates in the title role won for best actor.

The play was revived on Broadway in 2006 with Nathan Lane in the title role.

Writing of the original New York production, New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes said Mr. Gray has "written about this half-baked academic with astonishing compassion. Butley goes around 'spreading futility.' He slouches like a lost soul, and yet uses his wit like a sledgehammer to ward off the world and reality."

Mr. Gray's last major success was "Quartermaine's Terms" in 1981, about disillusioned teachers in a British university's language department.

His many other plays included "The Common Pursuit" (1984), about the reunion of Cambridge literary magazine friends, and "Cell Mates" (1995), which attracted attention less for the story about the spy George Blake than for the disappearance in mid-production of actor Stephen Fry.

Fry turned up several days later in Belgium citing a mental breakdown, and Mr. Gray was furious, blaming him for ruining the play's reception with audiences.

Mr. Gray found many new fans when his memoirs were published starting in the mid-1990s. They displayed unrelenting wit in the face of alcoholism, breakdowns, bouts with cancer and a physical decline that finds him on his 66th birthday "belching, farting, dribbling, wheezing" helplessly.

His marriage to Beryl Kevern, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce in 1997. That year, he married Victoria Rothschild, with whom he had been living for many years.

Although he gave up drink, he continued to smoke prodigiously. He wrote with satisfaction about finding a doctor at a party who agreed to treat his prostate cancer: "A smoking urologist was bound to be my sort of urologist."