The playwright Simon Gray died of lung cancer on 7 August 2008 at the age of seventy-one. He also found success later in life as a diarist, at first in wryly comic records of the disaster-prone productions of his plays – but with tragic irony most recently in The Smoking Diaries, reflecting on his lifelong addiction to cigarettes (and much else besides). Here, his friend the actor and writer Simon Callow pays a personal tribute.