Playwright and smoker Simon Gray dies

The playwright and diarist Simon Gray (pictured), a heroic drinker, but more particularly, a stalwart smoker whose intake peaked at 65-a-day, has died aged 71, from lung cancer. He has left at least one interesting headache behind: how to stage his last work? In his last year, he was completing the third volume of his memoirs - Coda, about his fight with cancer - but also working on a stage adaptation of the second volume, The Last Cigarette. Now that the health police have all but banned smoking in the theatre - a ruling that infuriated Gray - how it will be staged is perhaps a problem that he has been happy to leave to others.

Friends and colleagues at his funeral will be curious to see whether the comic actor Stephen Fry arrives to pay his condolences. The pair fell out badly when Fry, on the verge of a breakdown, absconded from the West End production of Gray's play, Cell Mates, and fled abroad in a disguise. He disappeared for days and many feared suicide. Gray gnashed his teeth publicly, calling Fry a coward and an inadequate actor, which had the effect of turning Fry into something of a heroic figure and Gray into a grudging monster.

Writing later in a book of the production that he brought out, Gray acknowledged that he had been excessively unkind about Fry - but he had, after all, lost his play which came off in the wake of Fry's flight - but he also took the opportunity to sketch with delicate malice a subversive portrait of the actor. (Continued below)

As the Daily Telegraph obituary puts it: "He detailed Fry's obsession with his computerised personal organiser, his habit of - 'in the most charming and eloquent way' - obviating the writer-director to tell the cast the meaning of their lines and his cheerful late arrivals for rehearsal. Having published the book, Gray himself then had a collapse."