Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, East London, on October 10, 1930, to parents of Jewish Eastern European descent; his father was a tailor.⁠[1][2][3]

His wartime evacuation as a child shaped much of his later work.⁠[3]

In 1948 Pinter refused to do national service in Britain.⁠[4]

Pinter briefly attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), which he did not enjoy, and then trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama.⁠[2][3]

During the 1950s he worked for many years as a repertory actor in Ireland and England, and began writing plays in that period.⁠[2][3]

In 1957 Pinter, then a 26-year-old actor, wrote his first play, The Room, in a few days at the request of his school friend Henry Woolf, a postgraduate student at the University of Bristol who wanted to direct it as part of his postgraduate work.⁠[5][6]

In May 1957 the play received its world premiere from students of the University of Bristol Department of Drama in the drama studio, a converted squash court in the Wills Memorial Building, with Woolf directing and playing Mr Kidd.⁠[5][6]

In 1958 The Birthday Party was staged at the Lyric Hammersmith, was savaged by critics and closed after eight performances; Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times was its only champion.⁠[2][3]

In 1960 The Caretaker opened at the Arts Theatre Club and established Pinter’s reputation. During its successful first run Pinter himself played Mick, replacing Alan Bates.⁠[2][7]

It was directed by Peter Hall, who went on to direct many of Pinter’s plays.⁠[2]

Pinter’s screenwriting included The Servant in 1963.⁠[3]

In 1964 The Birthday Party was filmed for television and revived in the West End to favourable reviews. Pinter wrote The Homecoming that year, and it premiered in 1965.⁠[2]

In 1967 The Homecoming won the Tony Award for Best Play; for the Broadway production Peter Hall won Best Director (Play), and Paul Rogers and Ian Holm won the awards for actor and featured actor in a play.⁠[8]

In 1970 Pinter wrote the screenplay for The Go-Between.⁠[3]

From the late 1960s Pinter wrote his “memory plays,” including Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978).⁠[2]

Pinter also worked as a director, staging his own plays and those of his friend Simon Gray, including Butley in 1971.⁠[7]

Pinter said that he committed himself to human rights after the assassination of the Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973.⁠[9]

In 1981 Pinter wrote the screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and in 1983 the film Betrayal, adapted from his own play, was released.⁠[3][9]

In his later career Pinter wrote overtly political plays about the abuse of power, such as One for the Road (1984).⁠[2]

In 1993 Pinter lent sixty boxes of his papers to the British Library, and a further twenty boxes were deposited between 1994 and 2005.⁠[10]

In 2002 Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus.⁠[11][7]

On October 13, 2005, the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature would go to Pinter, “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” He was the sole recipient.⁠[12][1]

Too ill to attend the ceremony, Pinter delivered his Nobel Lecture, “Art, Truth & Politics,” as a 46-minute pre-recorded video shown at the Börssalen of the Swedish Academy on December 7, 2005; in it he condemned the US and British invasion of Iraq.⁠[4][13]

In his presentation speech on December 10, Per Wästberg, Chairman of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, called Pinter the renewer of English drama in the 20th century, noted that “Pinteresque” appears as an adjective in the Oxford Dictionary, and said that he had written twenty-nine plays and directed or acted in about a hundred more.⁠[14]

In 2006 Pinter played the title role in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre, his last acting role.⁠[2][7]

In 2007 the British Library purchased Pinter’s entire archive with support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Friends of the British Library, the Friends of the National Libraries and other donors. Spanning 1943 to 2008 and catalogued as Add MS 88880, it includes his literary papers (plays, sketches, screenplays, poetry and prose), correspondence, scrapbooks, photograph albums, appointment diaries and his Nobel Prize papers.⁠[10]

On January 17, 2007, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented Pinter with the Légion d’honneur in London.⁠[11]

Pinter died of oesophageal cancer in London on December 24, 2008, aged 78.⁠[1][9]

On September 7, 2011, it was announced that Ambassador Theatre Group, owner of the Comedy Theatre in the West End since 2000, would rename it the Harold Pinter Theatre, with new signage expected in time for Pinter’s birthday that October. Many of Pinter’s plays had been staged there.⁠[15][2]

The plays listed by NobelPrize.org by year of writing include The Room, The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter (all 1957), A Slight Ache and The Hothouse (1958), The Caretaker and A Night Out (1959), Night School and The Dwarfs (1960), The Collection (1961), The Lover (1962), Tea Party and The Homecoming (1964), The Basement (1966), Landscape (1967), Silence (1968), Old Times (1970), Monologue (1972), No Man’s Land (1974), Betrayal (1978), Family Voices (1980), Other Places, A Kind of Alaska and Victoria Station (1982), One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order and Party Time (1991), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), Celebration (1999) and Remembrance of Things Past (2000).⁠[16]

His other publications include The Proust Screenplay (1977), Poems and Prose 1949–1977 (1978), the novel The Dwarfs (1990), Various Voices: Poetry, Prose, Politics, 1948–1998 (1998), Collected Screenplays 1–3 (2000), The Disappeared and Other Poems and Press Conference (2002), the poetry collection War (2003), Death etc. (2005) and The Essential Pinter (2006).⁠[16]

His screenplays also included The Quiller Memorandum, as well as adaptations of other writers’ novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Comfort of Strangers.⁠[4][9]

Pinter’s plays are known for distinctive dialogue marked by pauses and silences, and often explore complex relationships and power.⁠[3]

The presentation speech noted that his early “comedies of menace” used language as a weapon of aggression, evasion and torture; his characters are often trapped by class, set phrases and habit in enclosed spaces, power shifts between them, and memory shapes the present and the future. Pinter himself called his first period, represented by The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party and The Hothouse, political.⁠[14]

Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966, made a Companion of Literature in 1998 and a Companion of Honour in 2002, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).⁠[10]

He declined a knighthood and served as President of the Central School of Speech and Drama.⁠[7]

Pinter’s first wife was the actress Vivien Merchant, with whom he had a son, Daniel; his second wife was the writer and historian Lady Antonia Fraser.⁠[4][7]

In 1998 the University of Bristol awarded Pinter an honorary Doctor of Letters. The university lists him among its Nobel laureates.⁠[17][6]

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of The Room, Simon Reade, Artistic Director of the Bristol Old Vic, restaged the play with third-year drama students in the same room in the Wills Memorial Building, with three performances for an invited audience on May 24–26, 2007; one performance was recorded by the British Library Sound Archive for its Theatre Archive Project.⁠[5]