Simon Gray - Playwright and diarist

Born: 21 October, 1936, on Hayling Island, Hampshire. Died: 6 August, 2008, in London, aged 71.

SIMON Gray wrote bitingly comic plays such as Butley, Otherwise Engaged and Quartermaine's Terms about the educated British middle class and almost manically confessional late-in-life memoirs, turning his sardonic intelligence upon himself.

Roguishly witty, profligate of habit and relentlessly self-scrutinising, Gray was the embodiment of a literary stereotype, a grimly funny personality, deeply creative and determinedly self-destructive, a man who lived hard and wrote prolifically, if often in anguish. He smoked heavily and drank voluminously, champagne all day long (up to four bottles a day, he claimed) and whisky as well, until he gave up alcohol in the late 1990s after a doctor's threat that he would shortly be dead.

As for writing, it was grievously hard. His plays always started with a scrap of dialogue, he told many interviewers – "a character in a room says something, and I hope someone else will say something" – and he wrote until it stopped being agony, in 20, 30, sometimes 40 drafts.

"The last draft is always effortless," he said. "That's how I know it's finished."

Still, he managed to finish 40 plays, television plays and screenplays and five novels, nearly everything written while he was also a lecturer in drama, poetry and English literature at what is now Queen Mary, University of London. In fact, he considered himself a teacher first, a writer second. "Teaching is my bloody life," he said in 1977.

Over the past two decades he also produced a spate of sometimes witheringly self-deprecating reminiscences, among them The Smoking Diaries (2004), The Year of the Jouncer (2006) and The Last Cigarette (2008), all published by Granta, in which he chronicled his myriad problems – including his addictions, his waning health, his extramarital affair and his debilitating guilt over it, the vicissitudes of ageing and the many obstacles to the staging of his plays. At his death he was working on a stage adaptation of The Last Cigarette.

"So here I am, two hours into my 66th year," he wrote to begin The Smoking Diaries. "From now on I'm entitled to certain benefits, or so I gather – a state pension of so many pounds a week, free travel on public transport, reduced fee on the railways. I assume I'm also entitled to subsidiary benefits – respectful attention when I speak, unfailing assistance when I stumble or lurch, an absence of registration when I do the things I've been doing more and more frequently lately, but have struggled to keep under wraps – belching, farting, dribbling, wheezing. I can do all these things publicly now, in a spirit of mutual acceptance."

Simon James Holliday Gray was born in 1936, in Hayling Island, Hampshire. He was educated in London, then received degrees from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Cambridge. He began teaching in his early twenties.

As he told it, his playwriting career began serendipitously. One of his stories was sold for adaptation for television. Upon learning the adapter would be paid more than him, he volunteered to adapt it himself. Emboldened, he then wrote an original play for television, but it was rejected because of its subject matter – the main character, a criminal, spends most of his time onstage in transvestite disguise. He turned it instead into his first play, Wise Child, which was a success in London, starring Alec Guinness, in 1967. (It flopped on Broadway five years later, even with Donald Pleasence in the lead role.)

Butley, opened in London in 1971, directed by Harold Pinter and starring Alan Bates, two men with whom Gray would later work frequently. The play, which transferred to Broadway in 1972, concerns the emotional demise of a university lecturer whose professional and personal lives convulse catastrophically on a single day, and he responds in the only way he can: with brilliantly bitter invective.

Bates won a Tony Award for his performance, a tour de force so memorable (he reprised the role in a 1974 film) that for a quarter of a century it stanched enthusiasm for a revival with any other actor.

Otherwise Engaged, is a dark comedy that, like Butley, featured a troubled protagonist facing down unwanted intrusions, it starred Tom Courtenay as a determinedly dispassionate publisher whose planned restful day of listening to a Parsifal recording is repeatedly interrupted by ever more annoying visitors.

Gray didn't always focus on the lives of intellectuals. His plays include The Rear Column, a kind of Heart of Darkness story set in Africa and based on a true episode in the life of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley; Molly, a melodrama set in the 1930s about an adulterous affair between a middle-aged woman and a younger man; and Cell Mates, a spy story that made headlines when one of the lead actors, Stephen Fry, vanished in mid-run of the 1995 production, surfacing days later in Belgium. An incensed Gray wrote a vitriolic account of the whole business, Fat Chance.

But his best-known works are the ones that plumbed the territory he called "the world I know best". "Most of one's friends tend to be publishers, schoolteachers, students or actors," he said.

In Quartermaine's Terms (1981), he wrote about a feckless and unhappy band of teachers at a school for foreign students. (Its off-Broadway premiere, in 1983, featured a pre-Cheers Kelsey Grammer.) In The Common Pursuit (1984) he wrote about university friends as their lives progressed to some 20 years beyond their days together.

The disintegration of his family and his sorrow and guilt over it were among the issues he addressed, with a typically self-flagellating acceptance of his folly, in his memoirs. So was his inability to give up smoking.

"One way or another, I'm coming up to the last cigarette," he wrote.

Simon Gray is survived by his wife, Victoria Rothschild, the youngest daughter of the third Baron Rothschild and a fellow lecturer at his college. The two had an eight-year affair before Gray ended his first marriage, to Beryl Kevern. He had a son and a daughter with Ms Kevern, who also survive him.