Biography
Simon James Holliday Gray was born on 21 October 1936 on Hayling Island, in Hampshire, England, where his father, James, a G.P. who became a pathologist later, worked. In 1939, during World War II, when he was three years old, he was evacuated to Montreal, Canada, to live in "a house where his grandfather and 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 1965, he was appointed a lecturer in English at Queen Mary College, London. In 1967, he received a B.A. from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia; and, in 1971, another B.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge.
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 on 6 August 2008.
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.
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