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Harold Pinter

May 06, 2023

"Pinter" redirects here. For other people named Pinter, see Pinter (surname).

Harold Pinter CH CBE (/ˈpɪntər/; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

Harold Pinter

CH CBE
Pinter in 2005
Born(1930-10-10)10 October 1930
London, England, U.K.
Died24 December 2008(2008-12-24) (aged 78)
London, England, U.K.
OccupationPlaywright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, poet
Period1947–2008
Notable awards
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1956; div. 1980)​
​
​
(m. 1980)​
Children1
Signature
Harold Pinter's voice
from the BBC programme Front Row Interviews, 26 December 2008.[1]
Website
www.haroldpinter.org
 Literature portal

Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel, born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980.

Pinter's career as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957. His second play, The Birthday Party, closed after eight performances but was enthusiastically reviewed by critic Harold Hobson. His early works were described by critics as "comedy of menace". Later plays such as No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978) became known as "memory plays". He appeared as an actor in productions of his own work on radio and film, and directed nearly 50 productions for stage, theatre and screen. Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes and other honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French Légion d'honneur in 2007.

Despite frail health after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in December 2001, Pinter continued to act on stage and screen, last performing the title role of Samuel Beckett's one-act monologue Krapp's Last Tape, for the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre, in October 2006. He died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008.

Biography

Early life and education

Pinter was born on 10 October 1930, in Hackney, east London, the only child of British Jewish parents of Eastern European descent: his father, Hyman "Jack" Pinter (1902–1997) was a ladies' tailor; his mother, Frances (née Moskowitz; 1904–1992), a housewife.[2][3] Pinter believed an aunt's erroneous view that the family was Sephardic and had fled the Spanish Inquisition; thus, for his early poems, Pinter used the pseudonym Pinta and at other times used variations such as da Pinto.[4] Later research by Lady Antonia Fraser, Pinter's second wife, revealed the legend to be apocryphal; three of Pinter's grandparents came from Poland and the fourth from Odessa, so the family was Ashkenazic.[4][5][6]

Pinter's family home in London is described by his official biographer Michael Billington as "a solid, red-brick, three-storey villa just off the noisy, bustling, traffic-ridden thoroughfare of the Lower Clapton Road".[7] In 1940 and 1941, after the Blitz, Pinter was evacuated from their house in London to Cornwall and Reading.[7] Billington states that the "life-and-death intensity of daily experience" before and during the Blitz left Pinter with profound memories "of loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss: themes that are in all his works."[8]

Pinter discovered his social potential as a student at Hackney Downs School, a London grammar school, between 1944 and 1948. "Partly through the school and partly through the social life of Hackney Boys' Club ... he formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male friendship. The friends he made in those days – most particularly Henry Woolf, Michael (Mick) Goldstein and Morris (Moishe) Wernick – have always been a vital part of the emotional texture of his life."[6][9] A major influence on Pinter was his inspirational English teacher Joseph Brearley, who directed him in school plays and with whom he took long walks, talking about literature.[10] According to Billington, under Brearley's instruction, "Pinter shone at English, wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting."[11][12] In 1947 and 1948, he played Romeo and Macbeth in productions directed by Brearley.[13]

At the age of 12, Pinter began writing poetry, and in spring 1947, his poetry was first published in the Hackney Downs School Magazine.[14] In 1950 his poetry was first published outside the school magazine, in Poetry London, some of it under the pseudonym "Harold Pinta".[15][16]

Pinter was an atheist.[17]

Sport and friendship

Pinter enjoyed running and broke the Hackney Downs School sprinting record.[18][19] He was a cricket enthusiast, taking his bat with him when evacuated during the Blitz.[20] In 1971, he told Mel Gussow: "one of my main obsessions in life is the game of cricket—I play and watch and read about it all the time."[21] He was chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, a supporter of Yorkshire Cricket Club,[22] and devoted a section of his official website to the sport.[23] One wall of his study was dominated by a portrait of himself as a young man playing cricket, which was described by Sarah Lyall, writing in The New York Times: "The painted Mr. Pinter, poised to swing his bat, has a wicked glint in his eye; testosterone all but flies off the canvas."[24][25] Pinter approved of the "urban and exacting idea of cricket as a bold theatre of aggression."[26] After his death, several of his school contemporaries recalled his achievements in sports, especially cricket and running.[27] The BBC Radio 4 memorial tribute included an essay on Pinter and cricket.[28]

Other interests that Pinter mentioned to interviewers are family, love and sex, drinking, writing, and reading.[29] According to Billington, "If the notion of male loyalty, competitive rivalry and fear of betrayal forms a constant thread in Pinter's work from The Dwarfs onwards, its origins can be found in his teenage Hackney years. Pinter adores women, enjoys flirting with them, and worships their resilience and strength. But, in his early work especially, they are often seen as disruptive influences on some pure and Platonic ideal of male friendship: one of the most crucial of all Pinter's lost Edens."[6][30]

Early theatrical training and stage experience

Beginning in late 1948, Pinter attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two terms, but hating the school, missed most of his classes, feigned a nervous breakdown, and dropped out in 1949.[31] In 1948 he was called up for National Service. He was initially refused registration as a conscientious objector, leading to his twice being prosecuted, and fined, for refusing to accept a medical examination, before his CO registration was ultimately agreed.[32] He had a small part in the Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949 to 1950.[33] From January to July 1951, he attended the Central School of Speech and Drama.[34]

From 1951 to 1952, he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company, playing over a dozen roles.[35] In 1952, he began acting in regional English repertory productions; from 1953 to 1954, he worked for the Donald Wolfit Company, at the King's Theatre, Hammersmith, performing eight roles.[36][37] From 1954 until 1959, Pinter acted under the stage name David Baron.[38][39] In all, Pinter played over 20 roles under that name.[39][40] To supplement his income from acting, Pinter worked as a waiter, a postman, a bouncer, and a snow-clearer, meanwhile, according to Mark Batty, "harbouring ambitions as a poet and writer."[41] In October 1989 Pinter recalled: "I was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years. My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into."[42] During that period, he also performed occasional roles in his own and others' works for radio, TV, and film, as he continued to do throughout his career.[39][43]

Marriages and family life

 
Pinter's house in Worthing, 1962–64

From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant, an actress whom he met on tour,[44] perhaps best known for her performance in the 1966 film Alfie. Their son Daniel was born in 1958.[45] Through the early 1970s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, including The Homecoming on stage (1965) and screen (1973), but the marriage was turbulent.[46] For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with BBC-TV presenter and journalist Joan Bakewell, which inspired his 1978 play Betrayal,[47] and also throughout that period and beyond he had an affair with an American socialite, whom he nicknamed "Cleopatra". This relationship was another secret he kept from both his wife and Bakewell.[48] Initially, Betrayal was thought to be a response to his later affair with historian Antonia Fraser, the wife of Hugh Fraser, and Pinter's "marital crack-up".[49]

Pinter and Merchant had both met Antonia Fraser in 1969, when all three worked together on a National Gallery programme about Mary, Queen of Scots; several years later, on 8–9 January 1975, Pinter and Fraser became romantically involved.[50] That meeting initiated their five-year extramarital love affair.[51][52] After hiding the relationship from Merchant for two and a half months, on 21 March 1975, Pinter finally told her "I've met somebody".[53] After that, "Life in Hanover Terrace gradually became impossible", and Pinter moved out of their house on 28 April 1975, five days after the première of No Man's Land.[54][55]

In mid-August 1977, after Pinter and Fraser had spent two years living in borrowed and rented quarters, they moved into her former family home in Holland Park,[56] where Pinter began writing Betrayal.[49] He reworked it later, while on holiday at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, in early January 1978.[57] After the Frasers' divorce had become final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980, Pinter married Fraser on 27 November 1980.[58] Because of a two-week delay in Merchant's signing the divorce papers, however, the reception had to precede the actual ceremony, originally scheduled to occur on his 50th birthday.[59] Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in the first week of October 1982, at the age of 53.[60][61] Billington writes that Pinter "did everything possible to support" her and regretted that he ultimately became estranged from their son, Daniel, after their separation, Pinter's remarriage, and Merchant's death.[62]

A reclusive gifted musician and writer, Daniel changed his surname from Pinter to Brand, the maiden name of his maternal grandmother,[63] before Pinter and Fraser became romantically involved; while according to Fraser, his father could not understand it, she says that she could: "Pinter is such a distinctive name that he must have got tired of being asked, 'Any relation?'"[64] Michael Billington wrote that Pinter saw Daniel's name change as "a largely pragmatic move on Daniel's part designed to keep the press ... at bay."[65] Fraser told Billington that Daniel "was very nice to me at a time when it would have been only too easy for him to have turned on me ... simply because he had been the sole focus of his father's love and now manifestly wasn't."[65] Still unreconciled at the time of his father's death, Daniel Brand did not attend Pinter's funeral.[66]

Billington observes that "The break-up with Vivien and the new life with Antonia was to have a profound effect on Pinter's personality and his work," though he adds that Fraser herself did not claim to have influence over Pinter or his writing.[63] In her own contemporaneous diary entry dated 15 January 1993, Fraser described herself more as Pinter's literary midwife.[67] Indeed, she told Billington that "other people [such as Peggy Ashcroft, among others] had a shaping influence on [Pinter's] politics" and attributed changes in his writing and political views to a change from "an unhappy, complicated personal life ... to a happy, uncomplicated personal life", so that "a side of Harold which had always been there was somehow released. I think you can see that in his work after No Man's Land [1975], which was a very bleak play."[63]

Pinter was content in his second marriage and enjoyed family life with his six adult stepchildren and 17 step-grandchildren.[68] Even after battling cancer for several years, he considered himself "a very lucky man in every respect".[69] Sarah Lyall notes in her 2007 interview with Pinter in The New York Times that his "latest work, a slim pamphlet called 'Six Poems for A.', comprises poems written over 32 years, with "A" of course being Lady Antonia. The first of the poems was written in Paris, where she and Mr. Pinter traveled soon after they met. More than three decades later the two are rarely apart, and Mr. Pinter turns soft, even cozy, when he talks about his wife."[24] In that interview Pinter "acknowledged that his plays—full of infidelity, cruelty, inhumanity, the lot—seem at odds with his domestic contentment. 'How can you write a happy play?' he said. 'Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life.'"[24] After his death, Fraser told The Guardian: "He was a great man, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten."[70][71]

Civic activities and political activism

Main article: Harold Pinter and politics

In 1948–49, when he was 18, Pinter opposed the politics of the Cold War, leading to his decision to become a conscientious objector and to refuse to comply with National Service in the British military. However, he told interviewers that, if he had been old enough at the time, he would have fought against the Nazis in World War II.[72] He seemed to express ambivalence, both indifference and hostility, towards political structures and politicians in his Fall 1966 Paris Review interview conducted by Lawrence M. Bensky.[73] Yet, he had been an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and also had supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–1994), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaigns.[74][75][76] In "A Play and Its Politics", a 1985 interview with Nicholas Hern, Pinter described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of the politics of power and the dynamics of oppression.[77]

In his last 25 years, Pinter increasingly focused his essays, interviews and public appearances directly on political issues. He was an officer in International PEN, travelling with American playwright Arthur Miller to Turkey in 1985 on a mission co-sponsored with a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language.[78] He was also an active member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organisation that "campaigns in the UK against the US blockade of Cuba".[79] In 2001, Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM), which appealed for a fair trial and for the freedom of Slobodan Milošević, signing a related "Artists' Appeal for Milošević" in 2004.[80]

Pinter strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in FR Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the United States' 2001 War in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Among his provocative political statements, Pinter called Prime Minister Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" and compared the administration of President George W. Bush to Nazi Germany.[80][81] He stated that the United States "was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's 'mass-murdering' prime minister sat back and watched."[81] He was very active in the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition[82] and frequently criticising American aggression, as when he asked rhetorically, in his acceptance speech for the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry on 18 March 2007: "What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law."[83][84][85]

Pinter earned a reputation for being pugnacious, enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding.[86] Pinter's blunt political statements, and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, elicited strong criticism and even, at times, provoked ridicule and personal attacks.[87] The historian Geoffrey Alderman, author of the official history of Hackney Downs School, expressed his own "Jewish View" of Harold Pinter: "Whatever his merit as a writer, actor and director, on an ethical plane Harold Pinter seems to me to have been intensely flawed, and his moral compass deeply fractured."[88] David Edgar, writing in The Guardian, defended Pinter against what he termed Pinter's "being berated by the belligerati" like Johann Hari, who felt that he did not "deserve" to win the Nobel Prize.[89][90] Later Pinter continued to campaign against the Iraq War and on behalf of other political causes that he supported.

Pinter signed the mission statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians in 2005 and its full-page advertisement, "What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain", published in The Times on 6 July 2006,[88] and he was a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature. In April 2008, Pinter signed the statement "We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary". The statement noted: "We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land.", "We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East"[91]

Career

Further information: Works of Harold Pinter and Characteristics of Harold Pinter's work
 
Pinter in 1962

As actor

Pinter's acting career spanned over 50 years and, although he often played villains, included a wide range of roles on stage and in radio, film, and television.[36][92] In addition to roles in radio and television adaptations of his own plays and dramatic sketches, early in his screenwriting career he made several cameo appearances in films based on his own screenplays; for example, as a society man in The Servant (1963) and as Mr. Bell in Accident (1967), both directed by Joseph Losey; and as a bookshop customer in his later film Turtle Diary (1985), starring Michael Gambon, Glenda Jackson, and Ben Kingsley.[36]

Pinter's notable film and television roles included the lawyer Saul Abrahams opposite Peter O'Toole in Rogue Male, BBC TV's 1976 adaptation of Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel, and a drunk Irish journalist in Langrishe, Go Down (starring Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons) distributed on BBC Two in 1978[92] and released in movie theatres in 2002.[93] Pinter's later film roles included the criminal Sam Ross in Mojo (1997), written and directed by Jez Butterworth, based on Butterworth's play of the same name; Sir Thomas Bertram (his most substantial feature-film role) in Mansfield Park (1998), a character that Pinter described as "a very civilised man ... a man of great sensibility but in fact, he's upholding and sustaining a totally brutal system [the slave trade] from which he derives his money"; and Uncle Benny, opposite Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush, in The Tailor of Panama (2001).[36] In television films, he played Mr. Bearing, the father of ovarian cancer patient Vivian Bearing, played by Emma Thompson in Mike Nichols's HBO film of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit (2001); and the Director opposite John Gielgud (Gielgud's last role) and Rebecca Pidgeon in Catastrophe, by Samuel Beckett, directed by David Mamet as part of Beckett on Film (2001).[36][92]

As director

Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre (NT) in 1973.[94] He directed almost 50 productions of his own and others' plays for stage, film, and television, including 10 productions of works by Simon Gray: the stage and/or film premières of Butley (stage, 1971; film, 1974), Otherwise Engaged (1975), The Rear Column (stage, 1978; TV, 1980), Close of Play (NT, 1979), Quartermaine's Terms (1981), Life Support (1997), The Late Middle Classes (1999), and The Old Masters (2004).[44] Several of those productions starred Alan Bates (1934–2003), who originated the stage and screen roles of not only Butley but also Mick in Pinter's first major commercial success, The Caretaker (stage, 1960; film, 1964); and in Pinter's double-bill produced at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1984, he played Nicolas in One for the Road and the cab driver in Victoria Station.[95] Among over 35 plays that Pinter directed were Next of Kin (1974), by John Hopkins; Blithe Spirit (1976), by Noël Coward; The Innocents (1976), by William Archibald; Circe and Bravo (1986), by Donald Freed; Taking Sides (1995), by Ronald Harwood; and Twelve Angry Men (1996), by Reginald Rose.[94][96]

As playwright

Pinter was the author of 29 plays and 15 dramatic sketches and the co-author of two works for stage and radio.[97] He was considered to have been one of the most influential modern British dramatists,[98][99] Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world.[100] His style has entered the English language as an adjective, "Pinteresque", although Pinter himself disliked the term and found it meaningless.[101]

"Comedies of menace" (1957–1968)

Pinter's first play, The Room, written and first performed in 1957, was a student production at the University of Bristol, directed by his good friend, actor Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd (which he reprised in 2001 and 2007).[97] After Pinter mentioned that he had an idea for a play, Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it to fulfill a requirement for his postgraduate work. Pinter wrote it in three days.[102] The production was described by Billington as "a staggeringly confident debut which attracted the attention of a young producer, Michael Codron, who decided to present Pinter's next play, The Birthday Party, at the Lyric Hammersmith, in 1958."[103]

Written in 1957 and produced in 1958, Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, one of his best-known works, was initially both a commercial and critical disaster, despite an enthusiastic review in The Sunday Times by its influential drama critic Harold Hobson,[104] which appeared only after the production had closed and could not be reprieved.[103][105] Critical accounts often quote Hobson:

I am well aware that Mr Pinter[']s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning. At the moment I write these [words] it is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear, though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere. Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First [as in Class Honours]; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London ... Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party, despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.

Pinter himself and later critics generally credited Hobson as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career.[106]

In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, a play by David Campton, critic Irving Wardle called Pinter's early plays "comedy of menace"—a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work.[107] Such plays begin with an apparently innocent situation that becomes both threatening and "absurd" as Pinter's characters behave in ways often perceived as inexplicable by his audiences and one another. Pinter acknowledges the influence of Samuel Beckett, particularly on his early work; they became friends, sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments.[101][108]

Pinter wrote The Hothouse in 1958, which he shelved for over 20 years (See "Overtly political plays and sketches" below). Next he wrote The Dumb Waiter (1959), which premièred in Germany and was then produced in a double bill with The Room at the Hampstead Theatre Club, in London, in 1960.[97] It was then not produced often until the 1980s, and it has been revived more frequently since 2000, including the West End Trafalgar Studios production in 2007. The first production of The Caretaker, at the Arts Theatre Club, in London, in 1960, established Pinter's theatrical reputation.[109] The play transferred to the Duchess Theatre in May 1960 and ran for 444 performances,[110] receiving an Evening Standard Award for best play of 1960.[111] Large radio and television audiences for his one-act play A Night Out, along with the popularity of his revue sketches, propelled him to further critical attention.[112] In 1964, The Birthday Party was revived both on television (with Pinter himself in the role of Goldberg) and on stage (directed by Pinter at the Aldwych Theatre) and was well received.[113]

By the time Peter Hall's London production of The Homecoming (1964) reached Broadway in 1967, Pinter had become a celebrity playwright, and the play garnered four Tony Awards, among other awards.[114] During this period, Pinter also wrote the radio play A Slight Ache, first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1959 and then adapted to the stage and performed at the Arts Theatre Club in 1961. A Night Out (1960) was broadcast to a large audience on ABC Weekend TV's television show Armchair Theatre, after being transmitted on BBC Radio 3, also in 1960. His play Night School was first televised in 1960 on Associated Rediffusion. The Collection premièred at the Aldwych Theatre in 1962, and The Dwarfs, adapted from Pinter's then unpublished novel of the same title, was first broadcast on radio in 1960, then adapted for the stage (also at the Arts Theatre Club) in a double bill with The Lover, which had previously been televised by Associated Rediffusion in 1963; and Tea Party, a play that Pinter developed from his 1963 short story, first broadcast on BBC TV in 1965.[97]

Working as both a screenwriter and as a playwright, Pinter composed a script called The Compartment (1966), for a trilogy of films to be contributed by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Pinter, of which only Beckett's film, titled Film, was actually produced. Then Pinter turned his unfilmed script into a television play, which was produced as The Basement, both on BBC 2 and also on stage in 1968.[115]

"Memory plays" (1968–1982)

From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Pinter wrote a series of plays and sketches that explore complex ambiguities, elegiac mysteries, comic vagaries, and other "quicksand-like" characteristics of memory and which critics sometimes classify as Pinter's "memory plays".[116] These include Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), Night (1969), Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975), The Proust Screenplay (1977), Betrayal (1978), Family Voices (1981), Victoria Station (1982), and A Kind of Alaska (1982). Some of Pinter's later plays, including Party Time (1991), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and Celebration (2000), draw upon some features of his "memory" dramaturgy in their focus on the past in the present, but they have personal and political resonances and other tonal differences from these earlier memory plays.[116][117]

Overtly political plays and sketches (1980–2000)

Following a three-year period of creative drought in the early 1980s after his marriage to Antonia Fraser and the death of Vivien Merchant,[118] Pinter's plays tended to become shorter and more overtly political, serving as critiques of oppression, torture, and other abuses of human rights,[119] linked by the apparent "invulnerability of power."[120] Just before this hiatus, in 1979, Pinter re-discovered his manuscript of The Hothouse, which he had written in 1958 but had set aside; he revised it and then directed its first production himself at Hampstead Theatre in London, in 1980.[121] Like his plays of the 1980s, The Hothouse concerns authoritarianism and the abuses of power politics, but it is also a comedy, like his earlier comedies of menace. Pinter played the major role of Roote in a 1995 revival at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester.[122]

Pinter's brief dramatic sketch Precisely (1983) is a duologue between two bureaucrats exploring the absurd power politics of mutual nuclear annihilation and deterrence. His first overtly political one-act play is One for the Road (1984). In 1985 Pinter stated that whereas his earlier plays presented metaphors for power and powerlessness, the later ones present literal realities of power and its abuse.[123] Pinter's "political theatre dramatizes the interplay and conflict of the opposing poles of involvement and disengagement."[124] Mountain Language (1988) is about the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language.[78] The dramatic sketch The New World Order (1991) provides what Robert Cushman, writing in The Independent described as "10 nerve-wracking minutes" of two men threatening to torture a third man who is blindfolded, gagged and bound in a chair; Pinter directed the British première at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, where it opened on 9 July 1991, and the production then transferred to Washington, D.C., where it was revived in 1994.[125] Pinter's longer political satire Party Time (1991) premièred at the Almeida Theatre in London, in a double-bill with Mountain Language. Pinter adapted it as a screenplay for television in 1992, directing that production, first broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on 17 November 1992.[126]

Intertwining political and personal concerns, his next full-length plays, Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996) are set in domestic households and focus on dying and death; in their personal conversations in Ashes to Ashes, Devlin and Rebecca allude to unspecified atrocities relating to the Holocaust.[127] After experiencing the deaths of first his mother (1992) and then his father (1997), again merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems "Death" (1997) and "The Disappeared" (1998).

Pinter's last stage play, Celebration (2000), is a social satire set in an opulent restaurant, which lampoons The Ivy, a fashionable venue in London's West End theatre district, and its patrons who "have just come from performances of either the ballet or the opera. Not that they can remember a darn thing about what they saw, including the titles. [These] gilded, foul-mouthed souls are just as myopic when it comes to their own table mates (and for that matter, their food), with conversations that usually connect only on the surface, if there."[128] On its surface the play may appear to have fewer overtly political resonances than some of the plays from the 1980s and 1990s; but its central male characters, brothers named Lambert and Matt, are members of the elite (like the men in charge in Party Time), who describe themselves as "peaceful strategy consultants [because] we don't carry guns."[129] At the next table, Russell, a banker, describes himself as a "totally disordered personality ... a psychopath",[130] while Lambert "vows to be reincarnated as '[a] more civilised, [a] gentler person, [a] nicer person'."[131][132] These characters' deceptively smooth exteriors mask their extreme viciousness. Celebration evokes familiar Pinteresque political contexts: "The ritzy loudmouths in 'Celebration' ... and the quieter working-class mumblers of 'The Room' ... have everything in common beneath the surface".[128] "Money remains in the service of entrenched power, and the brothers in the play are 'strategy consultants' whose jobs involve force and violence ... It is tempting but inaccurate to equate the comic power inversions of the social behaviour in Celebration with lasting change in larger political structures", according to Grimes, for whom the play indicates Pinter's pessimism about the possibility of changing the status quo.[133] Yet, as the Waiter's often comically unbelievable reminiscences about his grandfather demonstrate in Celebration, Pinter's final stage plays also extend some expressionistic aspects of his earlier "memory plays", while harking back to his "comedies of menace", as illustrated in the characters and in the Waiter's final speech:

My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I'm still in the middle of it. I can't find the door to get out. My grandfather got out of it. He got right out of it. He left it behind him and he didn't look back. He got that absolutely right. And I'd like to make one further interjection.
He stands still. Slow fade.[134]

During 2000–2001, there were also simultaneous productions of Remembrance of Things Past, Pinter's stage adaptation of his unpublished Proust Screenplay, written in collaboration with and directed by Di Trevis, at the Royal National Theatre, and a revival of The Caretaker directed by Patrick Marber and starring Michael Gambon, Rupert Graves, and Douglas Hodge, at the Comedy Theatre.[97]

Like Celebration, Pinter's penultimate sketch, Press Conference (2002), "invokes both torture and the fragile, circumscribed existence of dissent".[135] In its première in the National Theatre's two-part production of Sketches, despite undergoing chemotherapy at the time, Pinter played the ruthless Minister willing to murder little children for the benefit of "The State".[136]

As screenwriter

Pinter composed 27 screenplays and film scripts for cinema and television, many of which were filmed, or adapted as stage plays.[137] His fame as a screenwriter began with his three screenplays written for films directed by Joseph Losey, leading to their close friendship: The Servant (1963), based on the novel by Robin Maugham; Accident (1967), adapted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley; and The Go-Between (1971), based on the novel by L. P. Hartley.[138] Films based on Pinter's adaptations of his own stage plays are: The Caretaker (1963), directed by Clive Donner; The Birthday Party (1968), directed by William Friedkin; The Homecoming (1973), directed by Peter Hall; and Betrayal (1983), directed by David Jones.

Pinter also adapted other writers' novels to screenplays, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964), based on the novel by Penelope Mortimer, directed by Jack Clayton; The Quiller Memorandum (1966), from the 1965 spy novel The Berlin Memorandum, by Elleston Trevor, directed by Michael Anderson; The Last Tycoon (1976), from the unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, directed by Elia Kazan; The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), from the novel by John Fowles, directed by Karel Reisz; Turtle Diary (1985), based on the novel by Russell Hoban; The Heat of the Day (1988), a television film, from the 1949 novel by Elizabeth Bowen; The Comfort of Strangers (1990), from the novel by Ian McEwan, directed by Paul Schrader; and The Trial (1993), from the novel by Franz Kafka, directed by David Jones.[139]

His commissioned screenplays of others' works for the films The Handmaid's Tale (1990), The Remains of the Day (1990), and Lolita (1997), remain unpublished and in the case of the latter two films, uncredited, though several scenes from or aspects of his scripts were used in these finished films.[140] His screenplays The Proust Screenplay (1972), Victory (1982), and The Dreaming Child (1997) and his unpublished screenplay The Tragedy of King Lear (2000) have not been filmed.[141] A section of Pinter's Proust Screenplay was, however, released as the 1984 film Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann), directed by Volker Schlöndorff, and it was also adapted by Michael Bakewell as a two-hour radio drama broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1995,[142] before Pinter and director Di Trevis collaborated to adapt it for the 2000 National Theatre production.[143]

Pinter's last filmed screenplay was an adaptation of the 1970 Tony Award-winning play Sleuth, by Anthony Shaffer, which was commissioned by Jude Law, one of the film's producers.[24] It is the basis for the 2007 film Sleuth, directed by Kenneth Branagh.[24][144][145] Pinter's screenplays for The French Lieutenant's Woman and Betrayal were nominated for Academy Awards in 1981 and 1983, respectively.[146]

2001–2008

 
Study of Pinter by Reginald Gray, 2007. (New Statesman, 12 January 2009)

From 16 to 31 July 2001, a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work, curated by Michael Colgan, artistic director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, was held as part of the annual Lincoln Center Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City. Pinter participated both as an actor, as Nicolas in One for the Road, and as a director of a double bill pairing his last play, Celebration, with his first play, The Room.[147] As part of a two-week "Harold Pinter Homage" at the World Leaders Festival of Creative Genius, held from 24 September to 30 October 2001, at the Harbourfront Centre, in Toronto, Canada, Pinter presented a dramatic reading of Celebration (2000) and also participated in a public interview as part of the International Festival of Authors.[148][149][150]

In December 2001, Pinter was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, for which, in 2002, he underwent an operation and chemotherapy.[151] During the course of his treatment, he directed a production of his play No Man's Land, and wrote and performed in a new sketch, "Press Conference", for a production of his dramatic sketches at the National Theatre, and from 2002 on he was increasingly active in political causes, writing and presenting politically charged poetry, essays, speeches, as well as involved in developing his final two screenplay adaptations, The Tragedy of King Lear and Sleuth, whose drafts are in the British Library's Harold Pinter Archive (Add MS 88880/2).[152]

From 9 to 25 January 2003, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, in Manitoba, Canada, held a nearly month-long PinterFest, in which over 130 performances of twelve of Pinter's plays were performed by a dozen different theatre companies.[153] Productions during the Festival included: The Hothouse, Night School, The Lover, The Dumb Waiter, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, Monologue, One for the Road, The Caretaker, Ashes to Ashes, Celebration, and No Man's Land.[154]

In 2005, Pinter stated that he had stopped writing plays and that he would be devoting his efforts more to his political activism and writing poetry: "I think I've written 29 plays. I think it's enough for me ... My energies are going in different directions—over the last few years I've made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies ... I'm using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand."[155][156] Some of this later poetry included "The 'Special Relationship'", "Laughter", and "The Watcher".

From 2005, Pinter suffered ill health, including a rare skin disease called pemphigus[157] and "a form of septicaemia that afflict[ed] his feet and made it difficult for him to walk."[158] Yet, he completed his screenplay for the film of Sleuth in 2005.[24][159] His last dramatic work for radio, Voices (2005), a collaboration with composer James Clarke, adapting selected works by Pinter to music, premièred on BBC Radio 3 on his 75th birthday on 10 October 2005.[160] Three days later, it was announced that he had won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.[161]

In an interview with Pinter in 2006, conducted by critic Michael Billington as part of the cultural programme of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, Pinter confirmed that he would continue to write poetry but not plays.[157] In response, the audience shouted No in unison, urging him to keep writing.[162] Along with the international symposium on Pinter: Passion, Poetry, Politics, curated by Billington, the 2006 Europe Theatre Prize theatrical events celebrating Pinter included new productions (in French) of Precisely (1983), One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991), Party Time (1991), and Press Conference (2002) (French versions by Jean Pavans); and Pinter Plays, Poetry & Prose, an evening of dramatic readings, directed by Alan Stanford, of the Gate Theatre, Dublin.[163] In June 2006, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) hosted a celebration of Pinter's films curated by his friend, the playwright David Hare. Hare introduced the selection of film clips by saying: "To jump back into the world of Pinter's movies ... is to remind yourself of a literate mainstream cinema, focused as much as Bergman's is on the human face, in which tension is maintained by a carefully crafted mix of image and dialogue."[164]

After returning to London from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in September 2006, Pinter began rehearsing for his performance of the role of Krapp in Samuel Beckett's one-act monologue Krapp's Last Tape, which he performed from a motorised wheelchair in a limited run the following month at the Royal Court Theatre to sold-out audiences and "ecstatic" critical reviews.[165] The production ran for only nine performances, as part of the 50th-anniversary celebration season of the Royal Court Theatre; it sold out within minutes of the opening of the box office and tickets commanded large sums from ticket resellers.[166] One performance was filmed and broadcast on BBC Four on 21 June 2007, and also screened later, as part of the memorial PEN Tribute to Pinter, in New York, on 2 May 2009.[167]

In October and November 2006, Sheffield Theatres hosted Pinter: A Celebration. It featured productions of seven of Pinter's plays: The Caretaker, Voices, No Man's Land, Family Voices, Tea Party, The Room, One for the Road, and The Dumb Waiter; and films (most his screenplays; some in which Pinter appears as an actor).[168]

In February and March 2007, a 50th anniversary of The Dumb Waiter, was produced at the Trafalgar Studios. Later in February 2007, John Crowley's film version of Pinter's play Celebration (2000) was shown on More4 (Channel 4, UK). On 18 March 2007, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a new radio production of The Homecoming, directed by Thea Sharrock and produced by Martin J. Smith, with Pinter performing the role of Max (for the first time; he had previously played Lenny on stage in 1964). A revival of The Hothouse opened at the National Theatre, in London, in July 2007, concurrently with a revival of Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Roger Michell.[169]

 
No Man's Land revival at Duke of York's Theatre, 30 December 2008

Revivals in 2008 included the 40th-anniversary production of the American première of The Homecoming on Broadway, directed by Daniel J. Sullivan.[170] From 8 to 24 May 2008, the Lyric Hammersmith celebrated the 50th anniversary of The Birthday Party with a revival and related events, including a gala performance and reception hosted by Harold Pinter on 19 May 2008, exactly 50 years after its London première there. The final revival during Pinter's lifetime was a production of No Man's Land, directed by Rupert Goold, opening at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in August 2008, and then transferring to the Duke of York's Theatre, London, where it played until 3 January 2009.[171] On the Monday before Christmas 2008, Pinter was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital, where he died on Christmas Eve from liver cancer, aged 78.[172]

On 26 December 2008, when No Man's Land reopened at the Duke of York's, the actors paid tribute to Pinter from the stage, with Michael Gambon reading Hirst's monologue about his "photograph album" from Act Two that Pinter had asked him to read at his funeral, ending with a standing ovation from the audience, many of whom were in tears:

I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own, of what you once were. You might see faces of others, in shadow, or cheeks of others, turning, or jaws, or backs of necks, or eyes, dark under hats, which might remind you of others, whom once you knew, whom you thought long dead, but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion ... trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows ... what relief ... it may give them ... who knows how they may quicken ... in their chains, in their glass jars. You think it cruel ... to quicken them, when they are fixed, imprisoned? No ... no. Deeply, deeply, they wish to respond to your touch, to your look, and when you smile, their joy ... is unbounded. And so I say to you, tender the dead, as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.[172][173][174]

Posthumous events

Funeral

 
Grave of Harold Pinter in Kensal Green Cemetery

Pinter's funeral was a private, half-hour secular ceremony conducted at the graveside at Kensal Green Cemetery, 31 December 2008. The eight readings selected in advance by Pinter included passages from seven of his own writings and from the story "The Dead", by James Joyce, which was read by actress Penelope Wilton. Michael Gambon read the "photo album" speech from No Man's Land and three other readings, including Pinter's poem "Death" (1997). Other readings honoured Pinter's widow and his love of cricket.[172] The ceremony was attended by many notable theatre people, including Tom Stoppard, but not by Pinter's son, Daniel Brand. At its end, Pinter's widow, Antonia Fraser, stepped forward to his grave and quoted from Horatio's speech after the death of Hamlet: "Goodnight, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."[172]

Memorial tributes

The night before Pinter's burial, theatre marquees on Broadway dimmed their lights for a minute in tribute,[175] and on the final night of No Man's Land at the Duke of York's Theatre on 3 January 2009, all of the Ambassador Theatre Group in the West End dimmed their lights for an hour to honour the playwright.[176]

Diane Abbott, the Member of Parliament for Hackney North & Stoke Newington proposed an early day motion in the House of Commons to support a residents' campaign to restore the Clapton Cinematograph Theatre, established in Lower Clapton Road in 1910, and to turn it into a memorial to Pinter "to honour this Hackney boy turned literary great."[177] On 2 May 2009, a free public memorial tribute was held at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. It was part of the 5th Annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, taking place in New York City.[178] Another memorial celebration, held in the Olivier Theatre, at the Royal National Theatre, in London, on the evening of 7 June 2009, consisted of excerpts and readings from Pinter's writings by nearly three dozen actors, many of whom were his friends and associates, including: Eileen Atkins, David Bradley, Colin Firth, Henry Goodman, Sheila Hancock, Alan Rickman, Penelope Wilton, Susan Wooldridge, and Henry Woolf; and a troupe of students from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, directed by Ian Rickson.[179][180]

On 16 June 2009, Antonia Fraser officially opened a commemorative room at the Hackney Empire. The theatre also established a writer's residency in Pinter's name.[181] Most of issue number 28 of Craig Raine's Arts Tri-Quarterly Areté was devoted to pieces remembering Pinter, beginning with Pinter's 1987 unpublished love poem dedicated "To Antonia" and his poem "Paris", written in 1975 (the year in which he and Fraser began living together), followed by brief memoirs by some of Pinter's associates and friends, including Patrick Marber, Nina Raine, Tom Stoppard, Peter Nichols, Susanna Gross, Richard Eyre, and David Hare.[182]

A memorial cricket match at Lord's Cricket Ground between the Gaieties Cricket Club and the Lord's Taverners, followed by performances of Pinter's poems and excerpts from his plays, took place on 27 September 2009.[183]

In 2009, English PEN established the PEN Pinter Prize, which is awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain who, in the words of Pinter's Nobel speech, casts an 'unflinching, unswerving' gaze upon the world, and shows a 'fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies'. The prize is shared with an international writer of courage. The inaugural winners of the prize were Tony Harrison and the Burmese poet and comedian Maung Thura (a.k.a. Zarganar).[184]

Being Harold Pinter

In January 2011 Being Harold Pinter, a theatrical collage of excerpts from Pinter's dramatic works, his Nobel Lecture, and letters of Belarusian prisoners, created and performed by the Belarus Free Theatre, evoked a great deal of attention in the public media. The Free Theatre's members had to be smuggled out of Minsk, owing to a government crackdown on dissident artists, to perform their production in a two-week sold-out engagement at La MaMa in New York as part of the 2011 Under the Radar Festival. In an additional sold-out benefit performance at the Public Theater, co-hosted by playwrights Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard, the prisoner's letters were read by ten guest performers: Mandy Patinkin, Kevin Kline, Olympia Dukakis, Lily Rabe, Linda Emond, Josh Hamilton, Stephen Spinella, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.[185] In solidarity with the Belarus Free Theatre, collaborations of actors and theatre companies joined in offering additional benefit readings of Being Harold Pinter across the United States.[186]

The Harold Pinter Theatre, London

In September 2011, British Theatre owners, Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) announced it was renaming its Comedy Theatre, Panton Street, London to become The Harold Pinter Theatre. Howard Panter, Joint CEO and Creative Director of ATG told the BBC, "The work of Pinter has become an integral part of the history of the Comedy Theatre. The re-naming of one of our most successful West End theatres is a fitting tribute to a man who made such a mark on British theatre who, over his 50 year career, became recognised as one of the most influential modern British dramatists."[187]

Honours

Further information: Honours and awards to Harold Pinter

An Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America (1970),[188][189] Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966[190] and became a Companion of Honour in 2002, having declined a knighthood in 1996.[191] In 1995, he accepted the David Cohen Prize, in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement. In 1996, he received a Laurence Olivier Special Award for lifetime achievement in the theatre.[192] In 1997 he became a BAFTA Fellow.[193] He received the World Leaders Award for "Creative Genius" as the subject of a week-long "Homage" in Toronto, in October 2001.[194] In 2004, he received the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry for his "lifelong contribution to literature, 'and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled War, published in 2003'".[195] In March 2006, he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in recognition of lifetime achievements pertaining to drama and theatre.[196] In conjunction with that award, the critic Michael Billington coordinated an international conference on Pinter: Passion, Poetry, Politics, including scholars and critics from Europe and the Americas, held in Turin, Italy, from 10 to 14 March 2006.[116][163][197]

In October 2008, the Central School of Speech and Drama announced that Pinter had agreed to become its president and awarded him an honorary fellowship at its graduation ceremony.[198] On his appointment, Pinter commented: "I was a student at Central in 1950–51. I enjoyed my time there very much and I am delighted to become president of a remarkable institution."[199] But he had to receive that honorary degree, his 20th, in absentia owing to ill health.[198] His presidency of the school was brief; he died just two weeks after the graduation ceremony, on 24 December 2008.

In 2013, he was posthumously awarded the Sretenje Order of Serbia.[200][201]

Nobel Prize in Literature

Main article: 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature

Légion d'honneur

On 18 January 2007, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented Pinter with France's highest civil honour, the Légion d'honneur, at a ceremony at the French embassy in London. De Villepin praised Pinter's poem "American Football" (1991) stating: "With its violence and its cruelty, it is for me one of the most accurate images of war, one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence." In response, Pinter praised France's opposition to the war in Iraq. M. de Villepin concluded: "The poet stands still and observes what doesn't deserve other men's attention. Poetry teaches us how to live and you, Harold Pinter, teach us how to live." He said that Pinter received the award particularly "because in seeking to capture all the facets of the human spirit, [Pinter's] works respond to the aspirations of the French public, and its taste for an understanding of man and of what is truly universal".[202][203] Lawrence Pollard observed that "the award for the great playwright underlines how much Mr Pinter is admired in countries like France as a model of the uncompromising radical intellectual".[202]

Scholarly response

Main article: Harold Pinter and academia

Some scholars and critics challenge the validity of Pinter's critiques of what he terms "the modes of thinking of those in power"[204] or dissent from his retrospective viewpoints on his own work.[205] In 1985, Pinter recalled that his early act of conscientious objection resulted from being "terribly disturbed as a young man by the Cold War. And McCarthyism ... A profound hypocrisy. 'They' the monsters, 'we' the good. In 1948, the Russian suppression of Eastern Europe was an obvious and brutal fact, but I felt very strongly then and feel as strongly now that we have an obligation to subject our own actions and attitudes to an equivalent critical and moral scrutiny."[206] Scholars agree that Pinter's dramatic rendering of power relations results from this scrutiny.[207]

Pinter's aversion to any censorship by "the authorities" is epitomised in Petey's line at the end of The Birthday Party. As the broken-down and reconstituted Stanley is being carted off by the figures of authority Goldberg and McCann, Petey calls after him, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" Pinter told Gussow in 1988, "I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now."[208] The example of Pinter's stalwart opposition to what he termed "the modes of thinking of those in power"—the "brick wall" of the "minds" perpetuating the "status quo"[209]—infused the "vast political pessimism" that some academic critics may perceive in his artistic work,[210] its "drowning landscape" of harsh contemporary realities, with some residual "hope for restoring the dignity of man."[211]

As Pinter's long-time friend David Jones reminded analytically inclined scholars and dramatic critics, Pinter was one of the "great comic writers":[212]

The trap with Harold's work, for performers and audiences, is to approach it too earnestly or portentously. I have always tried to interpret his plays with as much humour and humanity as possible. There is always mischief lurking in the darkest corners. The world of The Caretaker is a bleak one, its characters damaged and lonely. But they are all going to survive. And in their dance to that end they show a frenetic vitality and a wry sense of the ridiculous that balance heartache and laughter. Funny, but not too funny. As Pinter wrote, back in 1960: "As far as I am concerned The Caretaker IS funny, up to a point. Beyond that point, it ceases to be funny, and it is because of that point that I wrote it."[213]

His dramatic conflicts present serious implications for his characters and his audiences, leading to sustained inquiry about "the point" of his work and multiple "critical strategies" for developing interpretations and stylistic analyses of it.[214]

Pinter research collections

Further information: Harold Pinter Archive

Pinter's unpublished manuscripts and letters to and from him are held in the Harold Pinter Archive in the Modern Literary Manuscripts division of the British Library. Smaller collections of Pinter manuscripts are in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin;[15] The Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington; the Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, at the University of California, San Diego; the British Film Institute, in London; and the Margaret Herrick Library, Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.[215][216]

List of works and bibliography

Further information: List of works by Harold Pinter
Further information: Harold Pinter bibliography

See also

References

  1. ^ "Michael Caine". Front Row Interviews. 26 December 2008. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  2. ^ Harold Pinter, as quoted in Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 103.
  3. ^ Pinter, Harold. "Harold Pinter: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center". legacy.lib.utexas.edu. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  4. ^ a b Billington, Harold Pinter 1–5.
  5. ^ For some accounts of the significance of Pinter's Jewish background, see Billington, Harold Pinter 2, 40–41, 53–54, 79–81, 163–64, 177, 286, 390, 429.
  6. ^ a b c Cf. Woolf, Henry (12 July 2007). "My 60 Years in Harold's Gang". The Guardian. London: GMG. ISSN 0261-3077. OCLC 60623878. Archived from the original on 3 July 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2011.; Woolf, as quoted in Merritt, "Talking about Pinter" 144–45; Jacobson, Howard (10 January 2009). "Harold Pinter didn't get my joke, and I didn't get him – until it was too late". The Independent. London: INM. ISSN 0951-9467. OCLC 185201487. Archived from the original on 3 July 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  7. ^ a b Billington, Harold Pinter 2.
  8. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 5–10.
  9. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 11.
  10. ^ A collection of Pinter's correspondence with Brearley is held in the Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library. Pinter's memorial epistolary poem "Joseph Brearley 1909–1977 (Teacher of English)", published in his collection Various Voices (177), ends with the following stanza: "You're gone. I'm at your side,/Walking with you from Clapton Pond to Finsbury Park,/And on, and on."
  11. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 10–11.
  12. ^ See also "Introduction by Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate", 7–9 in Watkins, ed., 'Fortune's Fool': The Man Who Taught Harold Pinter: A Life of Joe Brearley.
  13. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 13–14.
  14. ^ Baker and Ross 127.
  15. ^ a b Staff (2011). . Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. University of Texas at Austin. Archived from the original on 4 June 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  16. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 29–35.
  17. ^ "The Meeting is a about the afterlife, despite Pinter being well known as an atheist. He admitted it was a "strange" piece for him to have written." Pinter 'on road to recovery', BBC.co.uk, 26 August 2002.
  18. ^ Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 28–29.
  19. ^ Baker, "Growing Up," chap. 1 of Harold Pinter 2–23.
  20. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 7–9 and 410.
  21. ^ Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 25.
  22. ^ Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 8.
  23. ^ Batty, Mark (ed.). . haroldpinter.org. Archived from the original on 13 June 2011. Retrieved 5 December 2010.
  24. ^ a b c d e f Lyall, Sarah (7 October 2007). . The New York Times. New York City. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 4 January 2012. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  25. ^ Sherwin, Adam (24 March 2009). . TimesOnline. London: News Intl. ISSN 0140-0460. Archived from the original on 16 June 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  26. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 410.
  27. ^ Supple, T. Baker, and Watkins, in Watkins, ed.
  28. ^ Burton, Harry (2009). . Lord's Taverners. Archived from the original on 27 June 2009. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  29. ^ See, e.g., Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 25–30; Billington, Harold Pinter 7–16; and Merritt, Pinter in Play 194.
  30. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 10–12.
  31. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 20–25, 31–35; and Batty, About Pinter 7.
  32. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 20–25.
  33. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 37; and Batty, About Pinter 8.
  34. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 31, 36, and 38; and Batty, About Pinter xiii and 8.
  35. ^ Pinter, "Mac", Various Voices 36–43.
  36. ^ a b c d e Batty, Mark (ed.). . haroldpinter.org. Archived from the original on 9 July 2011. Retrieved 29 January 2011.
  37. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 20–25, 31, 36, and 37–41.
  38. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 3 and 47–48. Pinter's paternal grandmother's maiden name was Baron. He also used the name for an autobiographical character in the first draft of his novel The Dwarfs.
  39. ^ a b c Batty, Mark (ed.). "The Harold Pinter Acting Career". haroldprinter.org. Archived from the original on 3 July 2011. Retrieved 30 January 2011., Batty, Mark (ed.). "Work in Various Repertory Companies 1954–1958". haroldprinter.org. Archived from the original on 3 July 2011. Retrieved 30 January 2011.
  40. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 49–55.
  41. ^ Batty, About Pinter 10.
  42. ^ Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 83.
  43. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 20–25, 31, 36, 38.
  44. ^ a b Staff (25 December 2008). . The Daily Telegraph. London. ISSN 0307-1235. OCLC 49632006. Archived from the original on 16 January 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  45. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 54 and 75.
  46. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 252–56.
  47. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 257–67.
  48. ^ Fraser, Must You Go? 86.
  49. ^ a b Billington, Harold Pinter 257.
  50. ^ Fraser, Chap. 1: "First Night", Must You Go? 3–19.
  51. ^ Fraser, chap. 1: "First Night"; chap. 2: "Pleasure and a Good Deal of Pain"; chap. 8: "It Is Here"; and chap. 13: "Marriage — Again", Must You Go? 3–33, 113–24, and 188–201.
  52. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 252–53.
  53. ^ Fraser, Must You Go? 13.
  54. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 253–55.
  55. ^ Staff (11 August 1975). . Time. Time Inc. Archived from the original on 20 May 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  56. ^ Fraser, Must You Go? 29, 65–78, and 83.
  57. ^ Fraser, Must You Go? 85–88.
  58. ^ Fraser, "27 November — The Diary of Lady Antonia Pinter", Must You Go? 122–23.
  59. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 271–76.
  60. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 276.
  61. ^ Staff (7 October 1982). . The New York Times. New York City. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 21 January 2010. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  62. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 276 and 345–47.
  63. ^ a b c Billington, Harold Pinter 255.
  64. ^ Fraser, Must You Go? 44.
  65. ^ a b Billington 254–55; cf. 345.
  66. ^ Sands, Sarah (4 January 2009). "Pinter's funeral – more final reckoning than reconciliation". The Independent. Archived from the original on 9 May 2022. Retrieved 24 April 2020.
  67. ^ Fraser, Must You Go? 211: "With all my timings [of Moonlight], Harold calls me his editor. Not so. I was the midwife saying, 'Push, Harold, push,' but the act of creation took place elsewhere and the baby would have been born anyway."
  68. ^ See Billington, Harold Pinter 388, 429–30.
  69. ^ Wark, Kirsty (23 June 2006). . Newsnight. BBC. Archived from the original on 12 November 2012. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  70. ^ Siddique, Haroon (25 December 2008). . The Guardian. London: GMG. ISSN 0261-3077. OCLC 60623878. Archived from the original on 5 September 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  71. ^ Walker, Peter; Smith, David; Siddique, Haroon (26 December 2008). . The Guardian. London: GMG. ISSN 0261-3077. OCLC 60623878. Archived from the original on 11 January 2012. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  72. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 21–24, 92, and 286.
  73. ^ Bensky, Lawrence M. (1966). (PDF). Paris Review. Vol. Fall 1966, no. 39. Paris Review Foundation. Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 January 2007. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  74. ^ Mbeki, Thabo (21 October 2005). . ANC Today. African National Congress. 5 (42). OCLC 212406525. Archived from the original on 22 June 2008. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  75. ^ Reddy, E.S. (July 1988). . ANC Today. African National Congress. OCLC 212406525. Archived from the original on 15 October 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2011.
  76. ^ Billington, Harold Pinter 286–305 (chap. 15: "Public Affairs"), 400–03, and 433–41; and Merritt, Pinter in Play 171–209 (chap. 8: "Cultural Politics," espec. "Pinter and Politics").
  77. ^ Merritt, "Pinter and Politics," Pinter in Play 171–89.
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Works cited

  • Baker, William (2008). Harold Pinter. Writers' Lives Series. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8264-9970-7.
  • Baker, William; Ross, John C. (2005). Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History. London: British Library and New Castle, DE. ISBN 1-58456-156-4.
  • Batty, Mark (2005). About Pinter: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-22005-3.
  • Begley, Varun (2005). Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-3887-6.
  • Billington, Michael (2007). Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-19065-2.
  • Fraser, Antonia (2010). Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion Books). ISBN 978-0-297-85971-0.
  • Gale, Steven H. (2003). Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2244-9.
  • Gordon, Lois, ed. (2001). Pinter at 70: A Casebook. Casebooks on Modern Dramatists (2 ed.). New York and London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-93630-9.
  • Grimes, Charles (2005). Harold Pinter's Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo. Madison & Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 0-8386-4050-8.
  • Gussow, Mel (1994). Conversations with Pinter. London: Nick Hern Books. ISBN 978-1-85459-201-9.
  • Hern, Nicholas; Pinter, Harold (February 1985). A Play and Its Politics: A Conversation between Harold Pinter and Nicholas Hern. Harold Pinter, 'One for the Road'. New York: Grove. pp. 5–23. ISBN 0-394-62363-0.
  • Hudgins, Christopher C. (2008). Gillen, Francis; Gale, Steven H. (eds.). "Three Unpublished Harold Pinter Filmscripts". The Pinter Review: Nobel Prize/Europe Theatre Prize Volume: 2005–2008. Tampa: University of Tampa Press: 132–39. ISSN 0895-9706. OCLC 16878624.
  • Karwowski, Michael (1 November 2003). . The Contemporary Review. Oxford: 291–96. ISSN 0010-7565. OCLC 1564974. Archived from the original on 12 January 2009.
  • Merritt, Susan Hollis (1995). Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-1674-9.
  • Merritt, Susan Hollis (2000). Gillen, Francis; Gale, Steven H. (eds.). "Harold Pinter's 'Ashes to Ashes': Political/Personal Echoes of the Holocaust". The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 1999 and 2000. Tampa: University of Tampa Press: 73–84. ISSN 0895-9706. OCLC 16878624.
  • Merritt, Susan Hollis (2002). Gillen, Francis; Gale, Steven H. (eds.). "Talking about Pinter: Collected Essays 2001 and 2002". The Pinter Review: Collected Essays: 2003 and 2004. Tampa: University of Tampa Press: 144–467. ISSN 0895-9706. OCLC 16878624.
  • Merritt, Susan Hollis (2004). Gillen, Francis; Gale, Steven H. (eds.). "Staging Pinter: From Pregnant Pauses to Political Cause". The Pinter Review: Collected Essays: 2003 and 2004. Tampa: University of Tampa Press: 123–43. ISSN 0895-9706. OCLC 16878624.
  • Münder, Peter (2008). Gillen, Francis; Gale, Steven H. (eds.). "Endgame with Spools: Harold Pinter in 'Krapp's Last Tape'". The Pinter Review: Nobel Prize/Europe Theatre Prize Volume: 2005– 008. Tampa: University of Tampa Press: 220–22. ISSN 0895-9706. OCLC 16878624.
  • Pinter, Harold (2000). 'Celebration' and 'The Room': Two Plays by Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-20497-7.
  • Pinter, Harold (2005). Art, Truth and Politics: The Nobel Lecture. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-23396-0.
  • Pinter, Harold (2008). "Introduction by Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate". In Watkins, G. L. (ed.). Fortune's Fool: The Man Who Taught Harold Pinter: A Life of Joe Brearley. Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, UK: TwigBooks in association with The Clove Club. pp. 7–9. ISBN 978-0-9547236-8-2.
  • Pinter, Harold (2009). Various Voices: Sixty Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2008 (3 ed.). London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-24480-5.
  • Quigley, Austin E. (2001). "Pinter, Politics and Postmodernmism (I)". In Raby, Peter (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 7–27. ISBN 978-0-521-65842-3.
  • Watkins, G. L., ed. (March 2009). The Clove's Lines: The Newsletter of the Clove Club: The Old Boys of Hackney Downs School. 3 (2): 1–36. {{cite journal}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

Further reading

Editions

  • Pinter, Harold. Plays: One | The Birthday Party, The Room, The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache, The Hothouse, A Night Out. (London: Methuen, 1983) ISBN 0-413-34650-1 Contains an introductory essay, Writing for the Theatre.
  • Pinter, Harold. Plays: Two | The Caretaker, The Collection, The Lover, Night School, The Dwarfs. (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979) ISBN 0-413-37300-2 Contains an introductory essay, Writing for Myself.
  • Pinter, Harold. Plays: Three | The Homecoming, The Tea Party, The Basement, Landscape, Silence. (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978) ISBN 0-413-38480-2

Works of criticism

External links

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Harold Pinter.
 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Harold Pinter.
  • Official website
  • Works by Harold Pinter at Open Library  
  • Harold Pinter at IMDb
  • Harold Pinter at the Internet Broadway Database  
  • International Harold Pinter Society (Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association, co-publisher of The Pinter Review)
  • at Granta (collection of useful links)
  • "Harold Pinter" at guardian.co.uk ("The best of The Guardian's coverage, including tributes, reviews and articles from the archive," periodically updated)
  • "Harold Pinter" in "Times Topics" at nytimes.com (periodically updated collection of news articles, reviews, commentaries, photographs, and Web resources from The New York Times )
  • on The Mark Shenton Show, TheatreVoice, recorded on 21 February 2007 (critics Michael Billington and Alastair Macaulay review Pinter's People and The Dumb Waiter; director and actor Harry Burton talks about his experiences with Pinter)
  • on TheatreVoice, recorded on 14 October 2005 (critical assessments by Michael Billington, Dan Rebellato, Charles Spencer and Ian Smith)
  • "Harold Pinter – Interview", British Library Online Gallery: What's On, British Library, 8 September 2008 (Pinter discusses his memories of postwar British theatre with Harry Burton)
  • Harold Pinter, Nobel Luminaries - Jewish Nobel Prize Winners, on the Beit Hatfutsot-The Museum of the Jewish People Website.
  • Harold Pinter on Nobelprize.org  
  • List of Works

May 06, 2023
harold, pinter, pinter, redirects, here, other, people, named, pinter, pinter, surname, october, 1930, december, 2008, british, playwright, screenwriter, director, actor, nobel, prize, winner, pinter, most, influential, modern, british, dramatists, with, writi. Pinter redirects here For other people named Pinter see Pinter surname Harold Pinter CH CBE ˈ p ɪ n t er 10 October 1930 24 December 2008 was a British playwright screenwriter director and actor A Nobel Prize winner Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years His best known plays include The Birthday Party 1957 The Homecoming 1964 and Betrayal 1978 each of which he adapted for the screen His screenplay adaptations of others works include The Servant 1963 The Go Between 1971 The French Lieutenant s Woman 1981 The Trial 1993 and Sleuth 2007 He also directed or acted in radio stage television and film productions of his own and others works Harold PinterCH CBEPinter in 2005Born 1930 10 10 10 October 1930London England U K Died24 December 2008 2008 12 24 aged 78 London England U K OccupationPlaywright screenwriter actor theatre director poetPeriod1947 2008Notable awardsCompanion of Honour 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature 2005 Legion d honneur 2007 David Cohen Prize 1995 Laurence Olivier Award 1996 SpouseVivien Merchant m 1956 div 1980 wbr Lady Antonia Fraser m 1980 wbr Children1SignatureHarold Pinter s voice source source source from the BBC programme Front Row Interviews 26 December 2008 1 Websitewww wbr haroldpinter wbr org Literature portalPinter was born and raised in Hackney east London and educated at Hackney Downs School He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player acting in school plays and writing poetry He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course He was fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector Subsequently he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son Daniel born in 1958 He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980 Pinter s career as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957 His second play The Birthday Party closed after eight performances but was enthusiastically reviewed by critic Harold Hobson His early works were described by critics as comedy of menace Later plays such as No Man s Land 1975 and Betrayal 1978 became known as memory plays He appeared as an actor in productions of his own work on radio and film and directed nearly 50 productions for stage theatre and screen Pinter received over 50 awards prizes and other honours including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French Legion d honneur in 2007 Despite frail health after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in December 2001 Pinter continued to act on stage and screen last performing the title role of Samuel Beckett s one act monologue Krapp s Last Tape for the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre in October 2006 He died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008 Contents 1 Biography 1 1 Early life and education 1 2 Sport and friendship 1 3 Early theatrical training and stage experience 1 4 Marriages and family life 2 Civic activities and political activism 3 Career 3 1 As actor 3 2 As director 3 3 As playwright 3 3 1 Comedies of menace 1957 1968 3 3 2 Memory plays 1968 1982 3 3 3 Overtly political plays and sketches 1980 2000 3 4 As screenwriter 3 5 2001 2008 4 Posthumous events 4 1 Funeral 4 2 Memorial tributes 4 3 Being Harold Pinter 4 4 The Harold Pinter Theatre London 5 Honours 5 1 Nobel Prize in Literature 5 2 Legion d honneur 6 Scholarly response 7 Pinter research collections 8 List of works and bibliography 9 See also 10 References 10 1 Works cited 11 Further reading 11 1 Editions 11 2 Works of criticism 12 External linksBiographyEarly life and education Pinter was born on 10 October 1930 in Hackney east London the only child of British Jewish parents of Eastern European descent his father Hyman Jack Pinter 1902 1997 was a ladies tailor his mother Frances nee Moskowitz 1904 1992 a housewife 2 3 Pinter believed an aunt s erroneous view that the family was Sephardic and had fled the Spanish Inquisition thus for his early poems Pinter used the pseudonym Pinta and at other times used variations such as da Pinto 4 Later research by Lady Antonia Fraser Pinter s second wife revealed the legend to be apocryphal three of Pinter s grandparents came from Poland and the fourth from Odessa so the family was Ashkenazic 4 5 6 Pinter s family home in London is described by his official biographer Michael Billington as a solid red brick three storey villa just off the noisy bustling traffic ridden thoroughfare of the Lower Clapton Road 7 In 1940 and 1941 after the Blitz Pinter was evacuated from their house in London to Cornwall and Reading 7 Billington states that the life and death intensity of daily experience before and during the Blitz left Pinter with profound memories of loneliness bewilderment separation and loss themes that are in all his works 8 Pinter discovered his social potential as a student at Hackney Downs School a London grammar school between 1944 and 1948 Partly through the school and partly through the social life of Hackney Boys Club he formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male friendship The friends he made in those days most particularly Henry Woolf Michael Mick Goldstein and Morris Moishe Wernick have always been a vital part of the emotional texture of his life 6 9 A major influence on Pinter was his inspirational English teacher Joseph Brearley who directed him in school plays and with whom he took long walks talking about literature 10 According to Billington under Brearley s instruction Pinter shone at English wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting 11 12 In 1947 and 1948 he played Romeo and Macbeth in productions directed by Brearley 13 At the age of 12 Pinter began writing poetry and in spring 1947 his poetry was first published in the Hackney Downs School Magazine 14 In 1950 his poetry was first published outside the school magazine in Poetry London some of it under the pseudonym Harold Pinta 15 16 Pinter was an atheist 17 Sport and friendship Pinter enjoyed running and broke the Hackney Downs School sprinting record 18 19 He was a cricket enthusiast taking his bat with him when evacuated during the Blitz 20 In 1971 he told Mel Gussow one of my main obsessions in life is the game of cricket I play and watch and read about it all the time 21 He was chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club a supporter of Yorkshire Cricket Club 22 and devoted a section of his official website to the sport 23 One wall of his study was dominated by a portrait of himself as a young man playing cricket which was described by Sarah Lyall writing in The New York Times The painted Mr Pinter poised to swing his bat has a wicked glint in his eye testosterone all but flies off the canvas 24 25 Pinter approved of the urban and exacting idea of cricket as a bold theatre of aggression 26 After his death several of his school contemporaries recalled his achievements in sports especially cricket and running 27 The BBC Radio 4 memorial tribute included an essay on Pinter and cricket 28 Other interests that Pinter mentioned to interviewers are family love and sex drinking writing and reading 29 According to Billington If the notion of male loyalty competitive rivalry and fear of betrayal forms a constant thread in Pinter s work from The Dwarfs onwards its origins can be found in his teenage Hackney years Pinter adores women enjoys flirting with them and worships their resilience and strength But in his early work especially they are often seen as disruptive influences on some pure and Platonic ideal of male friendship one of the most crucial of all Pinter s lost Edens 6 30 Early theatrical training and stage experience Beginning in late 1948 Pinter attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two terms but hating the school missed most of his classes feigned a nervous breakdown and dropped out in 1949 31 In 1948 he was called up for National Service He was initially refused registration as a conscientious objector leading to his twice being prosecuted and fined for refusing to accept a medical examination before his CO registration was ultimately agreed 32 He had a small part in the Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949 to 1950 33 From January to July 1951 he attended the Central School of Speech and Drama 34 From 1951 to 1952 he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company playing over a dozen roles 35 In 1952 he began acting in regional English repertory productions from 1953 to 1954 he worked for the Donald Wolfit Company at the King s Theatre Hammersmith performing eight roles 36 37 From 1954 until 1959 Pinter acted under the stage name David Baron 38 39 In all Pinter played over 20 roles under that name 39 40 To supplement his income from acting Pinter worked as a waiter a postman a bouncer and a snow clearer meanwhile according to Mark Batty harbouring ambitions as a poet and writer 41 In October 1989 Pinter recalled I was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones They re something to get your teeth into 42 During that period he also performed occasional roles in his own and others works for radio TV and film as he continued to do throughout his career 39 43 Marriages and family life Pinter s house in Worthing 1962 64 From 1956 until 1980 Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant an actress whom he met on tour 44 perhaps best known for her performance in the 1966 film Alfie Their son Daniel was born in 1958 45 Through the early 1970s Merchant appeared in many of Pinter s works including The Homecoming on stage 1965 and screen 1973 but the marriage was turbulent 46 For seven years from 1962 to 1969 Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with BBC TV presenter and journalist Joan Bakewell which inspired his 1978 play Betrayal 47 and also throughout that period and beyond he had an affair with an American socialite whom he nicknamed Cleopatra This relationship was another secret he kept from both his wife and Bakewell 48 Initially Betrayal was thought to be a response to his later affair with historian Antonia Fraser the wife of Hugh Fraser and Pinter s marital crack up 49 Pinter and Merchant had both met Antonia Fraser in 1969 when all three worked together on a National Gallery programme about Mary Queen of Scots several years later on 8 9 January 1975 Pinter and Fraser became romantically involved 50 That meeting initiated their five year extramarital love affair 51 52 After hiding the relationship from Merchant for two and a half months on 21 March 1975 Pinter finally told her I ve met somebody 53 After that Life in Hanover Terrace gradually became impossible and Pinter moved out of their house on 28 April 1975 five days after the premiere of No Man s Land 54 55 In mid August 1977 after Pinter and Fraser had spent two years living in borrowed and rented quarters they moved into her former family home in Holland Park 56 where Pinter began writing Betrayal 49 He reworked it later while on holiday at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne in early January 1978 57 After the Frasers divorce had become final in 1977 and the Pinters in 1980 Pinter married Fraser on 27 November 1980 58 Because of a two week delay in Merchant s signing the divorce papers however the reception had to precede the actual ceremony originally scheduled to occur on his 50th birthday 59 Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in the first week of October 1982 at the age of 53 60 61 Billington writes that Pinter did everything possible to support her and regretted that he ultimately became estranged from their son Daniel after their separation Pinter s remarriage and Merchant s death 62 A reclusive gifted musician and writer Daniel changed his surname from Pinter to Brand the maiden name of his maternal grandmother 63 before Pinter and Fraser became romantically involved while according to Fraser his father could not understand it she says that she could Pinter is such a distinctive name that he must have got tired of being asked Any relation 64 Michael Billington wrote that Pinter saw Daniel s name change as a largely pragmatic move on Daniel s part designed to keep the press at bay 65 Fraser told Billington that Daniel was very nice to me at a time when it would have been only too easy for him to have turned on me simply because he had been the sole focus of his father s love and now manifestly wasn t 65 Still unreconciled at the time of his father s death Daniel Brand did not attend Pinter s funeral 66 Billington observes that The break up with Vivien and the new life with Antonia was to have a profound effect on Pinter s personality and his work though he adds that Fraser herself did not claim to have influence over Pinter or his writing 63 In her own contemporaneous diary entry dated 15 January 1993 Fraser described herself more as Pinter s literary midwife 67 Indeed she told Billington that other people such as Peggy Ashcroft among others had a shaping influence on Pinter s politics and attributed changes in his writing and political views to a change from an unhappy complicated personal life to a happy uncomplicated personal life so that a side of Harold which had always been there was somehow released I think you can see that in his work after No Man s Land 1975 which was a very bleak play 63 Pinter was content in his second marriage and enjoyed family life with his six adult stepchildren and 17 step grandchildren 68 Even after battling cancer for several years he considered himself a very lucky man in every respect 69 Sarah Lyall notes in her 2007 interview with Pinter in The New York Times that his latest work a slim pamphlet called Six Poems for A comprises poems written over 32 years with A of course being Lady Antonia The first of the poems was written in Paris where she and Mr Pinter traveled soon after they met More than three decades later the two are rarely apart and Mr Pinter turns soft even cozy when he talks about his wife 24 In that interview Pinter acknowledged that his plays full of infidelity cruelty inhumanity the lot seem at odds with his domestic contentment How can you write a happy play he said Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation disarray I ve never been able to write a happy play but I ve been able to enjoy a happy life 24 After his death Fraser told The Guardian He was a great man and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years He will never be forgotten 70 71 Civic activities and political activismMain article Harold Pinter and politics In 1948 49 when he was 18 Pinter opposed the politics of the Cold War leading to his decision to become a conscientious objector and to refuse to comply with National Service in the British military However he told interviewers that if he had been old enough at the time he would have fought against the Nazis in World War II 72 He seemed to express ambivalence both indifference and hostility towards political structures and politicians in his Fall 1966 Paris Review interview conducted by Lawrence M Bensky 73 Yet he had been an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and also had supported the British Anti Apartheid Movement 1959 1994 participating in British artists refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaigns 74 75 76 In A Play and Its Politics a 1985 interview with Nicholas Hern Pinter described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of the politics of power and the dynamics of oppression 77 In his last 25 years Pinter increasingly focused his essays interviews and public appearances directly on political issues He was an officer in International PEN travelling with American playwright Arthur Miller to Turkey in 1985 on a mission co sponsored with a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers There he met victims of political oppression and their families Pinter s experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language 78 He was also an active member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign an organisation that campaigns in the UK against the US blockade of Cuba 79 In 2001 Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic ICDSM which appealed for a fair trial and for the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic signing a related Artists Appeal for Milosevic in 2004 80 Pinter strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in FR Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War the United States 2001 War in Afghanistan and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq Among his provocative political statements Pinter called Prime Minister Tony Blair a deluded idiot and compared the administration of President George W Bush to Nazi Germany 80 81 He stated that the United States was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain s mass murdering prime minister sat back and watched 81 He was very active in the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition 82 and frequently criticising American aggression as when he asked rhetorically in his acceptance speech for the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry on 18 March 2007 What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq A bandit act an act of blatant state terrorism demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law 83 84 85 Pinter earned a reputation for being pugnacious enigmatic taciturn terse prickly explosive and forbidding 86 Pinter s blunt political statements and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature elicited strong criticism and even at times provoked ridicule and personal attacks 87 The historian Geoffrey Alderman author of the official history of Hackney Downs School expressed his own Jewish View of Harold Pinter Whatever his merit as a writer actor and director on an ethical plane Harold Pinter seems to me to have been intensely flawed and his moral compass deeply fractured 88 David Edgar writing in The Guardian defended Pinter against what he termed Pinter s being berated by the belligerati like Johann Hari who felt that he did not deserve to win the Nobel Prize 89 90 Later Pinter continued to campaign against the Iraq War and on behalf of other political causes that he supported Pinter signed the mission statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians in 2005 and its full page advertisement What Is Israel Doing A Call by Jews in Britain published in The Times on 6 July 2006 88 and he was a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature In April 2008 Pinter signed the statement We re not celebrating Israel s anniversary The statement noted We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East 91 CareerFurther information Works of Harold Pinter and Characteristics of Harold Pinter s work Pinter in 1962 As actor Pinter s acting career spanned over 50 years and although he often played villains included a wide range of roles on stage and in radio film and television 36 92 In addition to roles in radio and television adaptations of his own plays and dramatic sketches early in his screenwriting career he made several cameo appearances in films based on his own screenplays for example as a society man in The Servant 1963 and as Mr Bell in Accident 1967 both directed by Joseph Losey and as a bookshop customer in his later film Turtle Diary 1985 starring Michael Gambon Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley 36 Pinter s notable film and television roles included the lawyer Saul Abrahams opposite Peter O Toole in Rogue Male BBC TV s 1976 adaptation of Geoffrey Household s 1939 novel and a drunk Irish journalist in Langrishe Go Down starring Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons distributed on BBC Two in 1978 92 and released in movie theatres in 2002 93 Pinter s later film roles included the criminal Sam Ross in Mojo 1997 written and directed by Jez Butterworth based on Butterworth s play of the same name Sir Thomas Bertram his most substantial feature film role in Mansfield Park 1998 a character that Pinter described as a very civilised man a man of great sensibility but in fact he s upholding and sustaining a totally brutal system the slave trade from which he derives his money and Uncle Benny opposite Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush in The Tailor of Panama 2001 36 In television films he played Mr Bearing the father of ovarian cancer patient Vivian Bearing played by Emma Thompson in Mike Nichols s HBO film of the Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit 2001 and the Director opposite John Gielgud Gielgud s last role and Rebecca Pidgeon in Catastrophe by Samuel Beckett directed by David Mamet as part of Beckett on Film 2001 36 92 As director Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s becoming an associate director of the National Theatre NT in 1973 94 He directed almost 50 productions of his own and others plays for stage film and television including 10 productions of works by Simon Gray the stage and or film premieres of Butley stage 1971 film 1974 Otherwise Engaged 1975 The Rear Column stage 1978 TV 1980 Close of Play NT 1979 Quartermaine s Terms 1981 Life Support 1997 The Late Middle Classes 1999 and The Old Masters 2004 44 Several of those productions starred Alan Bates 1934 2003 who originated the stage and screen roles of not only Butley but also Mick in Pinter s first major commercial success The Caretaker stage 1960 film 1964 and in Pinter s double bill produced at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1984 he played Nicolas in One for the Road and the cab driver in Victoria Station 95 Among over 35 plays that Pinter directed were Next of Kin 1974 by John Hopkins Blithe Spirit 1976 by Noel Coward The Innocents 1976 by William Archibald Circe and Bravo 1986 by Donald Freed Taking Sides 1995 by Ronald Harwood and Twelve Angry Men 1996 by Reginald Rose 94 96 As playwright Pinter was the author of 29 plays and 15 dramatic sketches and the co author of two works for stage and radio 97 He was considered to have been one of the most influential modern British dramatists 98 99 Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming and several other American awards and award nominations he and his plays received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world 100 His style has entered the English language as an adjective Pinteresque although Pinter himself disliked the term and found it meaningless 101 Comedies of menace 1957 1968 Pinter s first play The Room written and first performed in 1957 was a student production at the University of Bristol directed by his good friend actor Henry Woolf who also originated the role of Mr Kidd which he reprised in 2001 and 2007 97 After Pinter mentioned that he had an idea for a play Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it to fulfill a requirement for his postgraduate work Pinter wrote it in three days 102 The production was described by Billington as a staggeringly confident debut which attracted the attention of a young producer Michael Codron who decided to present Pinter s next play The Birthday Party at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958 103 Written in 1957 and produced in 1958 Pinter s second play The Birthday Party one of his best known works was initially both a commercial and critical disaster despite an enthusiastic review in The Sunday Times by its influential drama critic Harold Hobson 104 which appeared only after the production had closed and could not be reprieved 103 105 Critical accounts often quote Hobson I am well aware that Mr Pinter s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning At the moment I write these words it is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere Deliberately I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth not even a Second but a First as in Class Honours and that Pinter on the evidence of his work possesses the most original disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party despite their experiences last week will be heard of again Make a note of their names Pinter himself and later critics generally credited Hobson as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career 106 In a review published in 1958 borrowing from the subtitle of The Lunatic View A Comedy of Menace a play by David Campton critic Irving Wardle called Pinter s early plays comedy of menace a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work 107 Such plays begin with an apparently innocent situation that becomes both threatening and absurd as Pinter s characters behave in ways often perceived as inexplicable by his audiences and one another Pinter acknowledges the influence of Samuel Beckett particularly on his early work they became friends sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments 101 108 Pinter wrote The Hothouse in 1958 which he shelved for over 20 years See Overtly political plays and sketches below Next he wrote The Dumb Waiter 1959 which premiered in Germany and was then produced in a double bill with The Room at the Hampstead Theatre Club in London in 1960 97 It was then not produced often until the 1980s and it has been revived more frequently since 2000 including the West End Trafalgar Studios production in 2007 The first production of The Caretaker at the Arts Theatre Club in London in 1960 established Pinter s theatrical reputation 109 The play transferred to the Duchess Theatre in May 1960 and ran for 444 performances 110 receiving an Evening Standard Award for best play of 1960 111 Large radio and television audiences for his one act play A Night Out along with the popularity of his revue sketches propelled him to further critical attention 112 In 1964 The Birthday Party was revived both on television with Pinter himself in the role of Goldberg and on stage directed by Pinter at the Aldwych Theatre and was well received 113 By the time Peter Hall s London production of The Homecoming 1964 reached Broadway in 1967 Pinter had become a celebrity playwright and the play garnered four Tony Awards among other awards 114 During this period Pinter also wrote the radio play A Slight Ache first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1959 and then adapted to the stage and performed at the Arts Theatre Club in 1961 A Night Out 1960 was broadcast to a large audience on ABC Weekend TV s television show Armchair Theatre after being transmitted on BBC Radio 3 also in 1960 His play Night School was first televised in 1960 on Associated Rediffusion The Collection premiered at the Aldwych Theatre in 1962 and The Dwarfs adapted from Pinter s then unpublished novel of the same title was first broadcast on radio in 1960 then adapted for the stage also at the Arts Theatre Club in a double bill with The Lover which had previously been televised by Associated Rediffusion in 1963 and Tea Party a play that Pinter developed from his 1963 short story first broadcast on BBC TV in 1965 97 Working as both a screenwriter and as a playwright Pinter composed a script called The Compartment 1966 for a trilogy of films to be contributed by Samuel Beckett Eugene Ionesco and Pinter of which only Beckett s film titled Film was actually produced Then Pinter turned his unfilmed script into a television play which was produced as The Basement both on BBC 2 and also on stage in 1968 115 Memory plays 1968 1982 From the late 1960s through the early 1980s Pinter wrote a series of plays and sketches that explore complex ambiguities elegiac mysteries comic vagaries and other quicksand like characteristics of memory and which critics sometimes classify as Pinter s memory plays 116 These include Landscape 1968 Silence 1969 Night 1969 Old Times 1971 No Man s Land 1975 The Proust Screenplay 1977 Betrayal 1978 Family Voices 1981 Victoria Station 1982 and A Kind of Alaska 1982 Some of Pinter s later plays including Party Time 1991 Moonlight 1993 Ashes to Ashes 1996 and Celebration 2000 draw upon some features of his memory dramaturgy in their focus on the past in the present but they have personal and political resonances and other tonal differences from these earlier memory plays 116 117 Overtly political plays and sketches 1980 2000 Following a three year period of creative drought in the early 1980s after his marriage to Antonia Fraser and the death of Vivien Merchant 118 Pinter s plays tended to become shorter and more overtly political serving as critiques of oppression torture and other abuses of human rights 119 linked by the apparent invulnerability of power 120 Just before this hiatus in 1979 Pinter re discovered his manuscript of The Hothouse which he had written in 1958 but had set aside he revised it and then directed its first production himself at Hampstead Theatre in London in 1980 121 Like his plays of the 1980s The Hothouse concerns authoritarianism and the abuses of power politics but it is also a comedy like his earlier comedies of menace Pinter played the major role of Roote in a 1995 revival at the Minerva Theatre Chichester 122 Pinter s brief dramatic sketch Precisely 1983 is a duologue between two bureaucrats exploring the absurd power politics of mutual nuclear annihilation and deterrence His first overtly political one act play is One for the Road 1984 In 1985 Pinter stated that whereas his earlier plays presented metaphors for power and powerlessness the later ones present literal realities of power and its abuse 123 Pinter s political theatre dramatizes the interplay and conflict of the opposing poles of involvement and disengagement 124 Mountain Language 1988 is about the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language 78 The dramatic sketch The New World Order 1991 provides what Robert Cushman writing in The Independent described as 10 nerve wracking minutes of two men threatening to torture a third man who is blindfolded gagged and bound in a chair Pinter directed the British premiere at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs where it opened on 9 July 1991 and the production then transferred to Washington D C where it was revived in 1994 125 Pinter s longer political satire Party Time 1991 premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London in a double bill with Mountain Language Pinter adapted it as a screenplay for television in 1992 directing that production first broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on 17 November 1992 126 Intertwining political and personal concerns his next full length plays Moonlight 1993 and Ashes to Ashes 1996 are set in domestic households and focus on dying and death in their personal conversations in Ashes to Ashes Devlin and Rebecca allude to unspecified atrocities relating to the Holocaust 127 After experiencing the deaths of first his mother 1992 and then his father 1997 again merging the personal and the political Pinter wrote the poems Death 1997 and The Disappeared 1998 Pinter s last stage play Celebration 2000 is a social satire set in an opulent restaurant which lampoons The Ivy a fashionable venue in London s West End theatre district and its patrons who have just come from performances of either the ballet or the opera Not that they can remember a darn thing about what they saw including the titles These gilded foul mouthed souls are just as myopic when it comes to their own table mates and for that matter their food with conversations that usually connect only on the surface if there 128 On its surface the play may appear to have fewer overtly political resonances than some of the plays from the 1980s and 1990s but its central male characters brothers named Lambert and Matt are members of the elite like the men in charge in Party Time who describe themselves as peaceful strategy consultants because we don t carry guns 129 At the next table Russell a banker describes himself as a totally disordered personality a psychopath 130 while Lambert vows to be reincarnated as a more civilised a gentler person a nicer person 131 132 These characters deceptively smooth exteriors mask their extreme viciousness Celebration evokes familiar Pinteresque political contexts The ritzy loudmouths in Celebration and the quieter working class mumblers of The Room have everything in common beneath the surface 128 Money remains in the service of entrenched power and the brothers in the play are strategy consultants whose jobs involve force and violence It is tempting but inaccurate to equate the comic power inversions of the social behaviour in Celebration with lasting change in larger political structures according to Grimes for whom the play indicates Pinter s pessimism about the possibility of changing the status quo 133 Yet as the Waiter s often comically unbelievable reminiscences about his grandfather demonstrate in Celebration Pinter s final stage plays also extend some expressionistic aspects of his earlier memory plays while harking back to his comedies of menace as illustrated in the characters and in the Waiter s final speech My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I m still in the middle of it I can t find the door to get out My grandfather got out of it He got right out of it He left it behind him and he didn t look back He got that absolutely right And I d like to make one further interjection He stands still Slow fade 134 During 2000 2001 there were also simultaneous productions of Remembrance of Things Past Pinter s stage adaptation of his unpublished Proust Screenplay written in collaboration with and directed by Di Trevis at the Royal National Theatre and a revival of The Caretaker directed by Patrick Marber and starring Michael Gambon Rupert Graves and Douglas Hodge at the Comedy Theatre 97 Like Celebration Pinter s penultimate sketch Press Conference 2002 invokes both torture and the fragile circumscribed existence of dissent 135 In its premiere in the National Theatre s two part production of Sketches despite undergoing chemotherapy at the time Pinter played the ruthless Minister willing to murder little children for the benefit of The State 136 As screenwriter Pinter composed 27 screenplays and film scripts for cinema and television many of which were filmed or adapted as stage plays 137 His fame as a screenwriter began with his three screenplays written for films directed by Joseph Losey leading to their close friendship The Servant 1963 based on the novel by Robin Maugham Accident 1967 adapted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley and The Go Between 1971 based on the novel by L P Hartley 138 Films based on Pinter s adaptations of his own stage plays are The Caretaker 1963 directed by Clive Donner The Birthday Party 1968 directed by William Friedkin The Homecoming 1973 directed by Peter Hall and Betrayal 1983 directed by David Jones Pinter also adapted other writers novels to screenplays including The Pumpkin Eater 1964 based on the novel by Penelope Mortimer directed by Jack Clayton The Quiller Memorandum 1966 from the 1965 spy novel The Berlin Memorandum by Elleston Trevor directed by Michael Anderson The Last Tycoon 1976 from the unfinished novel by F Scott Fitzgerald directed by Elia Kazan The French Lieutenant s Woman 1981 from the novel by John Fowles directed by Karel Reisz Turtle Diary 1985 based on the novel by Russell Hoban The Heat of the Day 1988 a television film from the 1949 novel by Elizabeth Bowen The Comfort of Strangers 1990 from the novel by Ian McEwan directed by Paul Schrader and The Trial 1993 from the novel by Franz Kafka directed by David Jones 139 His commissioned screenplays of others works for the films The Handmaid s Tale 1990 The Remains of the Day 1990 and Lolita 1997 remain unpublished and in the case of the latter two films uncredited though several scenes from or aspects of his scripts were used in these finished films 140 His screenplays The Proust Screenplay 1972 Victory 1982 and The Dreaming Child 1997 and his unpublished screenplay The Tragedy of King Lear 2000 have not been filmed 141 A section of Pinter s Proust Screenplay was however released as the 1984 film Swann in Love Un amour de Swann directed by Volker Schlondorff and it was also adapted by Michael Bakewell as a two hour radio drama broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1995 142 before Pinter and director Di Trevis collaborated to adapt it for the 2000 National Theatre production 143 Pinter s last filmed screenplay was an adaptation of the 1970 Tony Award winning play Sleuth by Anthony Shaffer which was commissioned by Jude Law one of the film s producers 24 It is the basis for the 2007 film Sleuth directed by Kenneth Branagh 24 144 145 Pinter s screenplays for The French Lieutenant s Woman and Betrayal were nominated for Academy Awards in 1981 and 1983 respectively 146 2001 2008 Study of Pinter by Reginald Gray 2007 New Statesman 12 January 2009 From 16 to 31 July 2001 a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work curated by Michael Colgan artistic director of the Gate Theatre Dublin was held as part of the annual Lincoln Center Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City Pinter participated both as an actor as Nicolas in One for the Road and as a director of a double bill pairing his last play Celebration with his first play The Room 147 As part of a two week Harold Pinter Homage at the World Leaders Festival of Creative Genius held from 24 September to 30 October 2001 at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto Canada Pinter presented a dramatic reading of Celebration 2000 and also participated in a public interview as part of the International Festival of Authors 148 149 150 In December 2001 Pinter was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer for which in 2002 he underwent an operation and chemotherapy 151 During the course of his treatment he directed a production of his play No Man s Land and wrote and performed in a new sketch Press Conference for a production of his dramatic sketches at the National Theatre and from 2002 on he was increasingly active in political causes writing and presenting politically charged poetry essays speeches as well as involved in developing his final two screenplay adaptations The Tragedy of King Lear and Sleuth whose drafts are in the British Library s Harold Pinter Archive Add MS 88880 2 152 From 9 to 25 January 2003 the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Manitoba Canada held a nearly month long PinterFest in which over 130 performances of twelve of Pinter s plays were performed by a dozen different theatre companies 153 Productions during the Festival included The Hothouse Night School The Lover The Dumb Waiter The Homecoming The Birthday Party Monologue One for the Road The Caretaker Ashes to Ashes Celebration and No Man s Land 154 In 2005 Pinter stated that he had stopped writing plays and that he would be devoting his efforts more to his political activism and writing poetry I think I ve written 29 plays I think it s enough for me My energies are going in different directions over the last few years I ve made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies I m using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs which I think are very very worrying as things stand 155 156 Some of this later poetry included The Special Relationship Laughter and The Watcher From 2005 Pinter suffered ill health including a rare skin disease called pemphigus 157 and a form of septicaemia that afflict ed his feet and made it difficult for him to walk 158 Yet he completed his screenplay for the film of Sleuth in 2005 24 159 His last dramatic work for radio Voices 2005 a collaboration with composer James Clarke adapting selected works by Pinter to music premiered on BBC Radio 3 on his 75th birthday on 10 October 2005 160 Three days later it was announced that he had won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature 161 In an interview with Pinter in 2006 conducted by critic Michael Billington as part of the cultural programme of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin Italy Pinter confirmed that he would continue to write poetry but not plays 157 In response the audience shouted No in unison urging him to keep writing 162 Along with the international symposium on Pinter Passion Poetry Politics curated by Billington the 2006 Europe Theatre Prize theatrical events celebrating Pinter included new productions in French of Precisely 1983 One for the Road 1984 Mountain Language 1988 The New World Order 1991 Party Time 1991 and Press Conference 2002 French versions by Jean Pavans and Pinter Plays Poetry amp Prose an evening of dramatic readings directed by Alan Stanford of the Gate Theatre Dublin 163 In June 2006 the British Academy of Film and Television Arts BAFTA hosted a celebration of Pinter s films curated by his friend the playwright David Hare Hare introduced the selection of film clips by saying To jump back into the world of Pinter s movies is to remind yourself of a literate mainstream cinema focused as much as Bergman s is on the human face in which tension is maintained by a carefully crafted mix of image and dialogue 164 After returning to London from the Edinburgh International Book Festival in September 2006 Pinter began rehearsing for his performance of the role of Krapp in Samuel Beckett s one act monologue Krapp s Last Tape which he performed from a motorised wheelchair in a limited run the following month at the Royal Court Theatre to sold out audiences and ecstatic critical reviews 165 The production ran for only nine performances as part of the 50th anniversary celebration season of the Royal Court Theatre it sold out within minutes of the opening of the box office and tickets commanded large sums from ticket resellers 166 One performance was filmed and broadcast on BBC Four on 21 June 2007 and also screened later as part of the memorial PEN Tribute to Pinter in New York on 2 May 2009 167 In October and November 2006 Sheffield Theatres hosted Pinter A Celebration It featured productions of seven of Pinter s plays The Caretaker Voices No Man s Land Family Voices Tea Party The Room One for the Road and The Dumb Waiter and films most his screenplays some in which Pinter appears as an actor 168 In February and March 2007 a 50th anniversary of The Dumb Waiter was produced at the Trafalgar Studios Later in February 2007 John Crowley s film version of Pinter s play Celebration 2000 was shown on More4 Channel 4 UK On 18 March 2007 BBC Radio 3 broadcast a new radio production of The Homecoming directed by Thea Sharrock and produced by Martin J Smith with Pinter performing the role of Max for the first time he had previously played Lenny on stage in 1964 A revival of The Hothouse opened at the National Theatre in London in July 2007 concurrently with a revival of Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse directed by Roger Michell 169 No Man s Land revival at Duke of York s Theatre 30 December 2008 Revivals in 2008 included the 40th anniversary production of the American premiere of The Homecoming on Broadway directed by Daniel J Sullivan 170 From 8 to 24 May 2008 the Lyric Hammersmith celebrated the 50th anniversary of The Birthday Party with a revival and related events including a gala performance and reception hosted by Harold Pinter on 19 May 2008 exactly 50 years after its London premiere there The final revival during Pinter s lifetime was a production of No Man s Land directed by Rupert Goold opening at the Gate Theatre Dublin in August 2008 and then transferring to the Duke of York s Theatre London where it played until 3 January 2009 171 On the Monday before Christmas 2008 Pinter was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital where he died on Christmas Eve from liver cancer aged 78 172 On 26 December 2008 when No Man s Land reopened at the Duke of York s the actors paid tribute to Pinter from the stage with Michael Gambon reading Hirst s monologue about his photograph album from Act Two that Pinter had asked him to read at his funeral ending with a standing ovation from the audience many of whom were in tears I might even show you my photograph album You might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own of what you once were You might see faces of others in shadow or cheeks of others turning or jaws or backs of necks or eyes dark under hats which might remind you of others whom once you knew whom you thought long dead but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance if you can face the good ghost Allow the love of the good ghost They possess all that emotion trapped Bow to it It will assuredly never release them but who knows what relief it may give them who knows how they may quicken in their chains in their glass jars You think it cruel to quicken them when they are fixed imprisoned No no Deeply deeply they wish to respond to your touch to your look and when you smile their joy is unbounded And so I say to you tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered now in what you would describe as your life 172 173 174 Posthumous eventsFuneral Grave of Harold Pinter in Kensal Green Cemetery Pinter s funeral was a private half hour secular ceremony conducted at the graveside at Kensal Green Cemetery 31 December 2008 The eight readings selected in advance by Pinter included passages from seven of his own writings and from the story The Dead by James Joyce which was read by actress Penelope Wilton Michael Gambon read the photo album speech from No Man s Land and three other readings including Pinter s poem Death 1997 Other readings honoured Pinter s widow and his love of cricket 172 The ceremony was attended by many notable theatre people including Tom Stoppard but not by Pinter s son Daniel Brand At its end Pinter s widow Antonia Fraser stepped forward to his grave and quoted from Horatio s speech after the death of Hamlet Goodnight sweet prince And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest 172 Memorial tributes The night before Pinter s burial theatre marquees on Broadway dimmed their lights for a minute in tribute 175 and on the final night of No Man s Land at the Duke of York s Theatre on 3 January 2009 all of the Ambassador Theatre Group in the West End dimmed their lights for an hour to honour the playwright 176 Diane Abbott the Member of Parliament for Hackney North amp Stoke Newington proposed an early day motion in the House of Commons to support a residents campaign to restore the Clapton Cinematograph Theatre established in Lower Clapton Road in 1910 and to turn it into a memorial to Pinter to honour this Hackney boy turned literary great 177 On 2 May 2009 a free public memorial tribute was held at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York It was part of the 5th Annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature taking place in New York City 178 Another memorial celebration held in the Olivier Theatre at the Royal National Theatre in London on the evening of 7 June 2009 consisted of excerpts and readings from Pinter s writings by nearly three dozen actors many of whom were his friends and associates including Eileen Atkins David Bradley Colin Firth Henry Goodman Sheila Hancock Alan Rickman Penelope Wilton Susan Wooldridge and Henry Woolf and a troupe of students from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art directed by Ian Rickson 179 180 On 16 June 2009 Antonia Fraser officially opened a commemorative room at the Hackney Empire The theatre also established a writer s residency in Pinter s name 181 Most of issue number 28 of Craig Raine s Arts Tri Quarterly Arete was devoted to pieces remembering Pinter beginning with Pinter s 1987 unpublished love poem dedicated To Antonia and his poem Paris written in 1975 the year in which he and Fraser began living together followed by brief memoirs by some of Pinter s associates and friends including Patrick Marber Nina Raine Tom Stoppard Peter Nichols Susanna Gross Richard Eyre and David Hare 182 A memorial cricket match at Lord s Cricket Ground between the Gaieties Cricket Club and the Lord s Taverners followed by performances of Pinter s poems and excerpts from his plays took place on 27 September 2009 183 In 2009 English PEN established the PEN Pinter Prize which is awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain who in the words of Pinter s Nobel speech casts an unflinching unswerving gaze upon the world and shows a fierce intellectual determination to define the real truth of our lives and our societies The prize is shared with an international writer of courage The inaugural winners of the prize were Tony Harrison and the Burmese poet and comedian Maung Thura a k a Zarganar 184 Being Harold Pinter In January 2011 Being Harold Pinter a theatrical collage of excerpts from Pinter s dramatic works his Nobel Lecture and letters of Belarusian prisoners created and performed by the Belarus Free Theatre evoked a great deal of attention in the public media The Free Theatre s members had to be smuggled out of Minsk owing to a government crackdown on dissident artists to perform their production in a two week sold out engagement at La MaMa in New York as part of the 2011 Under the Radar Festival In an additional sold out benefit performance at the Public Theater co hosted by playwrights Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard the prisoner s letters were read by ten guest performers Mandy Patinkin Kevin Kline Olympia Dukakis Lily Rabe Linda Emond Josh Hamilton Stephen Spinella Lou Reed Laurie Anderson and Philip Seymour Hoffman 185 In solidarity with the Belarus Free Theatre collaborations of actors and theatre companies joined in offering additional benefit readings of Being Harold Pinter across the United States 186 The Harold Pinter Theatre London In September 2011 British Theatre owners Ambassador Theatre Group ATG announced it was renaming its Comedy Theatre Panton Street London to become The Harold Pinter Theatre Howard Panter Joint CEO and Creative Director of ATG told the BBC The work of Pinter has become an integral part of the history of the Comedy Theatre The re naming of one of our most successful West End theatres is a fitting tribute to a man who made such a mark on British theatre who over his 50 year career became recognised as one of the most influential modern British dramatists 187 HonoursFurther information Honours and awards to Harold Pinter An Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America 1970 188 189 Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 190 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 having declined a knighthood in 1996 191 In 1995 he accepted the David Cohen Prize in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement In 1996 he received a Laurence Olivier Special Award for lifetime achievement in the theatre 192 In 1997 he became a BAFTA Fellow 193 He received the World Leaders Award for Creative Genius as the subject of a week long Homage in Toronto in October 2001 194 In 2004 he received the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry for his lifelong contribution to literature and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled War published in 2003 195 In March 2006 he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in recognition of lifetime achievements pertaining to drama and theatre 196 In conjunction with that award the critic Michael Billington coordinated an international conference on Pinter Passion Poetry Politics including scholars and critics from Europe and the Americas held in Turin Italy from 10 to 14 March 2006 116 163 197 In October 2008 the Central School of Speech and Drama announced that Pinter had agreed to become its president and awarded him an honorary fellowship at its graduation ceremony 198 On his appointment Pinter commented I was a student at Central in 1950 51 I enjoyed my time there very much and I am delighted to become president of a remarkable institution 199 But he had to receive that honorary degree his 20th in absentia owing to ill health 198 His presidency of the school was brief he died just two weeks after the graduation ceremony on 24 December 2008 In 2013 he was posthumously awarded the Sretenje Order of Serbia 200 201 Nobel Prize in Literature Main article 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature Legion d honneur On 18 January 2007 French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented Pinter with France s highest civil honour the Legion d honneur at a ceremony at the French embassy in London De Villepin praised Pinter s poem American Football 1991 stating With its violence and its cruelty it is for me one of the most accurate images of war one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence In response Pinter praised France s opposition to the war in Iraq M de Villepin concluded The poet stands still and observes what doesn t deserve other men s attention Poetry teaches us how to live and you Harold Pinter teach us how to live He said that Pinter received the award particularly because in seeking to capture all the facets of the human spirit Pinter s works respond to the aspirations of the French public and its taste for an understanding of man and of what is truly universal 202 203 Lawrence Pollard observed that the award for the great playwright underlines how much Mr Pinter is admired in countries like France as a model of the uncompromising radical intellectual 202 Scholarly responseMain article Harold Pinter and academia Some scholars and critics challenge the validity of Pinter s critiques of what he terms the modes of thinking of those in power 204 or dissent from his retrospective viewpoints on his own work 205 In 1985 Pinter recalled that his early act of conscientious objection resulted from being terribly disturbed as a young man by the Cold War And McCarthyism A profound hypocrisy They the monsters we the good In 1948 the Russian suppression of Eastern Europe was an obvious and brutal fact but I felt very strongly then and feel as strongly now that we have an obligation to subject our own actions and attitudes to an equivalent critical and moral scrutiny 206 Scholars agree that Pinter s dramatic rendering of power relations results from this scrutiny 207 Pinter s aversion to any censorship by the authorities is epitomised in Petey s line at the end of The Birthday Party As the broken down and reconstituted Stanley is being carted off by the figures of authority Goldberg and McCann Petey calls after him Stan don t let them tell you what to do Pinter told Gussow in 1988 I ve lived that line all my damn life Never more than now 208 The example of Pinter s stalwart opposition to what he termed the modes of thinking of those in power the brick wall of the minds perpetuating the status quo 209 infused the vast political pessimism that some academic critics may perceive in his artistic work 210 its drowning landscape of harsh contemporary realities with some residual hope for restoring the dignity of man 211 As Pinter s long time friend David Jones reminded analytically inclined scholars and dramatic critics Pinter was one of the great comic writers 212 The trap with Harold s work for performers and audiences is to approach it too earnestly or portentously I have always tried to interpret his plays with as much humour and humanity as possible There is always mischief lurking in the darkest corners The world of The Caretaker is a bleak one its characters damaged and lonely But they are all going to survive And in their dance to that end they show a frenetic vitality and a wry sense of the ridiculous that balance heartache and laughter Funny but not too funny As Pinter wrote back in 1960 As far as I am concerned The Caretaker IS funny up to a point Beyond that point it ceases to be funny and it is because of that point that I wrote it 213 His dramatic conflicts present serious implications for his characters and his audiences leading to sustained inquiry about the point of his work and multiple critical strategies for developing interpretations and stylistic analyses of it 214 Pinter research collectionsFurther information Harold Pinter Archive Pinter s unpublished manuscripts and letters to and from him are held in the Harold Pinter Archive in the Modern Literary Manuscripts division of the British Library Smaller collections of Pinter manuscripts are in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center the University of Texas at Austin 15 The Lilly Library Indiana University at Bloomington the Mandeville Special Collections Library Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego the British Film Institute in London and the Margaret Herrick Library Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Beverly Hills California 215 216 List of works and bibliographyFurther information List of works by Harold Pinter Further information Harold Pinter bibliographySee alsoInternational PEN PEN Pinter Prize Jewish left List of Jewish Nobel laureatesReferences Michael Caine Front Row Interviews 26 December 2008 BBC Radio 4 Retrieved 18 January 2014 Harold Pinter as quoted in Gussow Conversations with Pinter 103 Pinter Harold Harold Pinter An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center legacy lib utexas edu Retrieved 27 April 2021 a b Billington Harold Pinter 1 5 For some accounts of the significance of Pinter s Jewish background see Billington Harold Pinter 2 40 41 53 54 79 81 163 64 177 286 390 429 a b c Cf Woolf Henry 12 July 2007 My 60 Years in Harold s Gang The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Woolf as quoted in Merritt Talking about Pinter 144 45 Jacobson Howard 10 January 2009 Harold Pinter didn t get my joke and I didn t get him until it was too late The Independent London INM ISSN 0951 9467 OCLC 185201487 Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 a b Billington Harold Pinter 2 Billington Harold Pinter 5 10 Billington Harold Pinter 11 A collection of Pinter s correspondence with Brearley is held in the Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library Pinter s memorial epistolary poem Joseph Brearley 1909 1977 Teacher of English published in his collection Various Voices 177 ends with the following stanza You re gone I m at your side Walking with you from Clapton Pond to Finsbury Park And on and on Billington Harold Pinter 10 11 See also Introduction by Harold Pinter Nobel Laureate 7 9 in Watkins ed Fortune s Fool The Man Who Taught Harold Pinter A Life of Joe Brearley Billington Harold Pinter 13 14 Baker and Ross 127 a b Staff 2011 Harold Pinter An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center University of Texas at Austin Archived from the original on 4 June 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 29 35 The Meeting is a about the afterlife despite Pinter being well known as an atheist He admitted it was a strange piece for him to have written Pinter on road to recovery BBC co uk 26 August 2002 Gussow Conversations with Pinter 28 29 Baker Growing Up chap 1 of Harold Pinter 2 23 Billington Harold Pinter 7 9 and 410 Gussow Conversations with Pinter 25 Gussow Conversations with Pinter 8 Batty Mark ed Cricket haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 5 December 2010 a b c d e f Lyall Sarah 7 October 2007 Harold Pinter Sleuth The New York Times New York City ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on 4 January 2012 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Sherwin Adam 24 March 2009 Portrait of Harold Pinter playing cricket to be sold at auction TimesOnline London News Intl ISSN 0140 0460 Archived from the original on 16 June 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 410 Supple T Baker and Watkins in Watkins ed Burton Harry 2009 Latest News amp Charity Fundraising News from The Lord s Taverners Lord s Taverners Archived from the original on 27 June 2009 Retrieved 26 June 2011 See e g Gussow Conversations with Pinter 25 30 Billington Harold Pinter 7 16 and Merritt Pinter in Play 194 Billington Harold Pinter 10 12 Billington Harold Pinter 20 25 31 35 and Batty About Pinter 7 Billington Harold Pinter 20 25 Billington Harold Pinter 37 and Batty About Pinter 8 Billington Harold Pinter 31 36 and 38 and Batty About Pinter xiii and 8 Pinter Mac Various Voices 36 43 a b c d e Batty Mark ed Acting haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 9 July 2011 Retrieved 29 January 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 20 25 31 36 and 37 41 Billington Harold Pinter 3 and 47 48 Pinter s paternal grandmother s maiden name was Baron He also used the name for an autobiographical character in the first draft of his novel The Dwarfs a b c Batty Mark ed The Harold Pinter Acting Career haroldprinter org Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 30 January 2011 Batty Mark ed Work in Various Repertory Companies 1954 1958 haroldprinter org Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 30 January 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 49 55 Batty About Pinter 10 Gussow Conversations with Pinter 83 Billington Harold Pinter 20 25 31 36 38 a b Staff 25 December 2008 Harold Pinter the most original stylish and enigmatic writer in the post war revival of British theatre The Daily Telegraph London ISSN 0307 1235 OCLC 49632006 Archived from the original on 16 January 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 54 and 75 Billington Harold Pinter 252 56 Billington Harold Pinter 257 67 Fraser Must You Go 86 a b Billington Harold Pinter 257 Fraser Chap 1 First Night Must You Go 3 19 Fraser chap 1 First Night chap 2 Pleasure and a Good Deal of Pain chap 8 It Is Here and chap 13 Marriage Again Must You Go 3 33 113 24 and 188 201 Billington Harold Pinter 252 53 Fraser Must You Go 13 Billington Harold Pinter 253 55 Staff 11 August 1975 People Time Time Inc Archived from the original on 20 May 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Fraser Must You Go 29 65 78 and 83 Fraser Must You Go 85 88 Fraser 27 November The Diary of Lady Antonia Pinter Must You Go 122 23 Billington Harold Pinter 271 76 Billington Harold Pinter 276 Staff 7 October 1982 Death of Vivien Merchant Is Ascribed to Alcoholism The New York Times New York City ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on 21 January 2010 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 276 and 345 47 a b c Billington Harold Pinter 255 Fraser Must You Go 44 a b Billington 254 55 cf 345 Sands Sarah 4 January 2009 Pinter s funeral more final reckoning than reconciliation The Independent Archived from the original on 9 May 2022 Retrieved 24 April 2020 Fraser Must You Go 211 With all my timings of Moonlight Harold calls me his editor Not so I was the midwife saying Push Harold push but the act of creation took place elsewhere and the baby would have been born anyway See Billington Harold Pinter 388 429 30 Wark Kirsty 23 June 2006 Harold Pinter on Newsnight Review Newsnight BBC Archived from the original on 12 November 2012 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Siddique Haroon 25 December 2008 Nobel prize winning dramatist Harold Pinter dies The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 5 September 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Walker Peter Smith David Siddique Haroon 26 December 2008 Multi award winning playwright lauded by dignitaries of theatrical and political worlds The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 11 January 2012 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 21 24 92 and 286 Bensky Lawrence M 1966 The Art of Theater No 3 Harold Pinter PDF Paris Review Vol Fall 1966 no 39 Paris Review Foundation Archived from the original PDF on 1 January 2007 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Mbeki Thabo 21 October 2005 Letter from the President Hail the Nobel Laureates Apostles of Human Curiosity ANC Today African National Congress 5 42 OCLC 212406525 Archived from the original on 22 June 2008 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Reddy E S July 1988 Free Mandela An Account of the Campaign to Free Nelson Mandela and All Other Political Prisoners in South Africa ANC Today African National Congress OCLC 212406525 Archived from the original on 15 October 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 286 305 chap 15 Public Affairs 400 03 and 433 41 and Merritt Pinter in Play 171 209 chap 8 Cultural Politics espec Pinter and Politics Merritt Pinter and Politics Pinter in Play 171 89 a b Billington Harold Pinter 309 10 and Gussow Conversations with Pinter 67 68 Cuba Solidarity Campaign Our Aims cuba solidarity org Archived from the original on 18 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 a b Kamm Oliver 26 December 2008 Harold Pinter An impassioned artist who lost direction on the political stage TimesOnline London News International ISSN 0140 0460 Archived from the original on 17 April 2010 Retrieved 26 June 2011 a b Chrisafis Angelique Tilden Imogen 11 June 2003 Pinter blasts Nazi America and deluded idiot Blair The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 17 May 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Pinter Harold 11 December 2002 The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild animal The Daily Telegraph London ISSN 0307 1235 OCLC 49632006 Archived from the original on 29 June 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Pinter Various Voices 267 Billington Harold Pinter 428 Anderson Porter 17 March 2006 Harold Pinter Theater s angry old man CNN Turner Broadcasting System Archived from the original on 16 October 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Harold Pinter s poetry The known and the unknown The Economist Vol 400 no 8747 London The Financial Times 20 August 2011 See e g Hari Johann 5 December 2005 Harold Pinter does not deserve the Nobel Prize Johann Hari johannhari com Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Hitchens Christopher 17 October 2005 The Sinister Mediocrity of Harold Pinter WSJ com The Wall Street Journal New York City Dow Jones ISSN 0099 9660 Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 and Pryce Jones David 28 October 2005 Harold Pinter s Special Triteness National Review Online Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 a b Alderman Geoffrey 2011 Harold Pinter A Jewish View currentviewpoint com Archived from the original on 8 July 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Edgar David 29 December 2008 Pinter s early politics The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 10 November 2012 Retrieved 26 June 2011 The idea that he was a dissenting figure only in later life ignores the politics of his early work See also the comments of Vaclav Havel and others excerpted in A Colossal Figure which accompanies a reprinting of Pinter s essay Pinter Harold 14 October 2005 Pinter Torture and misery in name of freedom World Politics World The Independent The Independent London INM ISSN 0951 9467 OCLC 185201487 Archived from the original on 16 February 2010 Retrieved 27 June 2011 adapted from Pinter s Acceptance Speech for the 2005 Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry published in Pinter Various Voices 267 68 Letters We re not celebrating Israel s anniversary The Guardian 30 April 2008 a b c Pinter Harold 1930 2008 Credits BFI Screenonline British Film Institute 2011 Archived from the original on 5 July 2004 Retrieved 3 July 2011 Batty Mark ed 2001 The Lincoln Center Festival haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 3 July 2011 a b Harold Pinter Director and Playwright at the National Theatre Royal National Theatre Archived from the original MSWord on 29 May 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Staff 31 March 1984 Critics Choice The Times Times Digital Archive 61794 16 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Batty Mark ed 2011 Stage film and TV productions directed by Harold Pinter haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 a b c d e Evans Daisy Herdman Katie Lankester Laura eds Plays haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 9 May 2009 Staff 25 December 2008 Harold Pinter one of the most influential British playwrights of modern times The Daily Telegraph London ISSN 0307 1235 OCLC 49632006 Archived from the original on 18 May 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Gussow Mel Brantley Ben 25 December 2008 Harold Pinter Playwright of the Anxious Pause Dies at 78 The New York Times New York City ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on 3 November 2012 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Gordon Chronology Pinter at 70 xliii lxv Batty Chronology About Pinter xiii xvi a b Harold Pinter on Newsnight Review with Kirsty Wark Newsnight Review BBC Archived from the original on 12 November 2012 Retrieved 26 June 2010 Merritt Talking about Pinter 147 a b Billington Michael 25 December 2008 The most provocative poetic and influential playwright of his generation The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 27 February 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Hobson Harold 25 May 1958 The Screw Turns Again The Sunday Times London Hobson The Screw Turns Again cited by Merritt in Sir Harold Hobson The Promptings of Personal Experience Pinter in Play 221 25 rpt in Hobson Harold 2011 The Birthday Party Premiere haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 9 July 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 85 Gussow Conversations with Pinter 141 Merritt Pinter in Play 5 9 225 26 and 310 See Billington Harold Pinter 64 65 84 197 251 and 354 Jones David Fall 2003 Roundabout Theatre Company Front amp Center Online Roundabout Theatre Company Archived from the original on 27 July 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Background to The Caretaker Sheffield Theatres education resource Sheffield Theatres Archived from the original on 14 May 2009 Retrieved 11 July 2011 Shama Sunita 20 October 2010 Pinter awards saved for the nation British Library Press Release Museums Arts and Libraries Archived from the original on 27 July 2011 Retrieved 11 July 2011 Merritt Pinter in Play 18 Merritt Pinter in Play 18 219 20 The Homecoming 1967 tonyawards com Tony Award Productions 2011 Archived from the original on 1 December 2018 Retrieved 3 July 2011 Baker and Ross Chronology xxiii xl a b c Billington Introduction Pinter Passion Poetry Politics Europe Theatre Prize X Edition Turin 10 12 March 2006 Retrieved 29 January 2011 Cf Billington chap 29 Memory Man and Afterword Let s Keep Fighting Harold Pinter 388 430 See Batty About Pinter Grimes and Baker all passim Billington Harold Pinter 258 Merritt Pinter in Play xi xv and 170 209 Grimes 19 Grimes 119 Nightingale Benedict 2001 The Hothouse Premiere Originally published in the New Statesman archived at haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Merritt Pinter Playing Pinter passim and Grimes 16 36 38 61 71 Hern 8 9 16 17 and 21 Hern 19 Cushman Robert 21 July 1991 Ten Nerve Racking Minutes of Pinter Independent on Sunday archived at haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 14 June 2011 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Grimes 101 28 and 139 43 Batty Mark ed 2011 Plays haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 14 June 2011 Retrieved 3 July 2011 Merritt Harold Pinter s Ashes to Ashes Political Personal Echoes of the Holocaust passim Grimes 195 220 a b Brantley Ben 27 July 2001 Pinter s Silences Richly Eloquent The New York Times archived at haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 9 May 2009 Pinter Celebration 60 Pinter Celebration 39 Pinter Celebration 56 Grimes 129 Grimes 130 Pinter Celebration 72 Grimes 135 Macaulay Alastair 13 February 2002 The Playwright s Triple Risk The Financial Times archived at haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 9 May 2009 MacNab Geoffrey 27 December 2008 Harold Pinter True star of the screen The Independent London INM ISSN 0951 9467 OCLC 185201487 Archived from the original on 24 June 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Dawson Jeff 21 June 2009 Open Your Eyes to These Cult Classics The Sunday Times archived at LexisNexis London News International p 10 Maslin Janet 24 November 1993 Kafka s Sinister World by Way of Pinter The New York Times New York City ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved 3 July 2011 Hudgins 132 39 Gale Appendix A Quick Reference Sharp Cut 416 17 Baker and Ross xxxiii Batty Mark ed Remembrance of Things Past Cottesloe Theatre London November 2000 haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 1 July 2009 Levey Emanuel 29 August 2007 Interviews Sleuth with Pinter Branagh Law and Caine emanuellevy com Archived from the original on 15 May 2011 Retrieved 31 January 2011 Levey Emanuel 29 August 2007 Sleuth 2007 Remake or Revamping of Old Play emanuellevy com Archived from the original on 9 October 2007 Retrieved 31 January 2011 Gale Appendix B Honors and Awards for Screenwriting Sharp Cut n pag 418 Merritt Talking about Pinter passim Harold Pinter Added to IFOA Lineup Harbourfront Reading Series Toronto Harbourfront Centre Archived from the original on 25 February 2002 Retrieved 27 June 2011 Staff 9 September 2001 Travel Advisory Toronto Festival Honors 14 Leaders in the Arts New York Times The New York Times New York City ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 28 June 2011 Merritt Staging Pinter From Pregnant Pauses to Political Causes 123 43 Koval Ramona 15 September 2009 Books and Writing 15 9 2002 Harold Pinter ABC Radio National Australian Broadcasting Corporation Archived from the original on 16 March 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 413 16 Staff 2011 Pinter Archive Manuscripts catalogue British Library Archived from the original on 24 November 2011 Retrieved 4 May 2011 MS 88880 2 Batty Mark ed 2003 Pinter Fest 2003 haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Merritt PinterFest in Forthcoming Publications Upcoming Productions and Other Works in Progress Harold Pinter Bibliography 2000 2002 299 Lawson Mark 28 February 2005 Pinter to give up writing plays BBC News London BBC Archived from the original on 24 March 2012 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Robinson David 26 August 2006 I m written out says controversial Pinter Scotsman com News Johnston Press Digital Publishing Archived from the original on 29 June 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 a b Billington Michael 14 March 2006 I ve written 29 damn plays Isn t that enough The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 30 August 2010 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 395 Billington Harold Pinter 418 20 Staff 2011 BBC Radio 3 Voices Harold Pinter s 75th birthday bbc co uk Archived from the original on 7 February 2012 Retrieved 4 May 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 420 Merritt Susan Hollis Fall 2006 Europe Theatre Prize Celebration Turin Italy Harold Pinter Society Newsletter Print a b Europe Theatre Prize X Edition spettacoli premio europa org in Italian and English 2006 Archived from the original on 27 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 429 Billington Michael 16 October 2006 Krapp s Last Tape Royal Court London The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 13 November 2012 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Munder 220 cf Fraser Must You Go 304 and 307 PEN World Voices Festival Harold Pinter Memorial Celebration Martin E Segal Theatre Center The City University of New York 2009 Archived from the original on 14 June 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Pinter A Celebration sheffieldtheatres co uk 2011 Archived from the original on 16 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 West Samuel 17 March 2007 Fathers and sons The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 11 April 2010 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Batty Mark ed 2011 Worldwide Calendar haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 9 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Staff 10 November 2008 Photo Flash No Man s Land at the Duke of York westend broadwayworld com Archived from the original on 17 January 2012 Retrieved 29 June 2011 a b c d Billington Michael 1 January 2009 Goodnight sweet prince Shakespearean farewell to Pinter The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 26 March 2010 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Pinter No Man s Land Four Plays 69 70 Staff 27 December 2008 West End pays tribute to Pinter BBC News London BBC Archived from the original on 12 November 2013 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Staff 31 December 2008 Friends bid Pinter final farewell BBC News London BBC Archived from the original on 30 July 2012 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Smith Alistair 2 January 2009 The Stage News Pinter to be honoured before final performance of No Man s Land thestage co uk London The Stage Newspaper Limited Archived from the original on 12 June 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Diane Abbott Calls for Pinter Cinema dianeabbott org uk 2011 Archived from the original on 29 September 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 PEN American Center Tribute to Harold Pinter pen org 2 May 2009 Archived from the original on 14 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 BBC Two Programmes Arena Harold Pinter A Celebration BBC 2009 Archived from the original on 21 January 2010 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Coveney Michael 9 June 2009 Harold Pinter a celebration National Theatre London The Independent London INM ISSN 0951 9467 OCLC 185201487 Archived from the original on 18 May 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Jury Louise 17 June 2009 Harold Pinter honoured by Hackney Empire thisislondon co uk London ES London Limited Archived from the original on 6 June 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Arete 28 Spring Summer 2009 17 89 ISBN 978 0 9554553 8 4 Smith Ed 2 October 2009 Lord s tribute was celebration of Harold Pinter s two great loves cricket and literature Telegraph The Daily Telegraph London ISSN 0307 1235 OCLC 49632006 Archived from the original on 19 May 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 English PEN website http www englishpen org prizes pen pinter prize Kline Hoffman et al Lend Support to Belarus Free Theater with Being Harold Pinter Benefit at The Public Tonight 1 17 broadwayworld com 17 January 2011 Archived from the original on 5 May 2012 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Gunderson Lauren 19 January 2011 Countrywide Free Theatre Stands up to Dictators huffingtonpost com Archived from the original on 2 April 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Harold Pinter has London theatre named after him BBC News London BBC 7 September 2011 Retrieved 8 September 2011 Past Honorary Fellows Modern Language Association Archived from the original on 4 December 2008 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Batty Mark ed 2011 Biography haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 9 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Supplement to The London Gazette 11th June 1966 London Gazette Government of the United Kingdom 44004 6539 11 June 1996 Archived from the original on 19 October 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 White Michael 15 June 2002 Arise Sir Mick but Pinter takes surprise top honour The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 13 November 2012 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Olivier Winners 1996 The Official London Theatre Guide 24 April 2008 Archived from the original on 15 May 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Academy Fellows bafta org 2011 Archived from the original on 25 May 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Staff 9 September 2001 Travel Advisory Toronto Festival Honors 14 Leaders in the Arts The New York Times New York City ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on 3 July 2011 Retrieved 3 July 2011 Ezard John 4 August 2004 Pinter awarded Wilfred Owen prize for poetry opposing Iraq conflict The Guardian London GMG ISSN 0261 3077 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 23 March 2011 Retrieved 3 July 2011 Europe Theatre Prize X Edition pinter motivazioni premio europa org in Italian and English 2006 Archived from the original on 27 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Billington Harold Pinter 427 28 a b Obituaries Harold Pinter 1930 2008 Central School of Speech and Drama 2011 Archived from the original on 20 May 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Smith Alistair 14 October 2008 The Stage News Pinter replaces Mandelson as Central president thestage co uk The Stage Newspaper Limited Archived from the original on 16 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Ukazi o odlikovaњima Predsednik Republike Srbiјe Retrieved 27 January 2021 Nikolic odlikovao strane drzavnike i zasluzne pojedince kurir rs in Serbian Retrieved 27 January 2021 a b France in the United Kingdom 17 January 2007 Legion d Honneur for Harold Pinter French Embassy in the UK Archived from the original on 17 July 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Staff 18 January 2007 French PM honours Harold Pinter BBC News London BBC Archived from the original on 13 August 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2011 Merritt Pinter in Play 171 89 Begley Karwowski and Quigley Quoted in Merritt Pinter in Play 178 Cf e g Batty Preface xvii xix and chap 6 9 55 221 in About Pinter Grimes 19 36 71 218 20 and passim Quoted in Merritt Pinter in Play 179 Merritt Pinter in Play 180 Grimes 220 Pinter Art Truth and Politics 9 and 24 Coppa Francesca 2011 Raby Peter ed Cambridge Collections Online The sacred joke Comedy and politics in Pinter s early plays The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter Cambridge University Press p 45 ISBN 978 0 521 65842 3 Retrieved 30 June 2011 Jones David Fall 2003 Roundabout Theatre Company Front amp Center Online roundabouttheatre org Archived from the original on 27 July 2011 Retrieved 29 June 2011 cf Woolf quoted in Merritt Talking about Pinter 147 48 Merritt Pinter in Play passim Baker and Ross Appendix One 224 Batty Mark ed 2011 Links Libraries and Academia haroldpinter org Archived from the original on 28 December 2008 Retrieved 29 June 2011 Works cited Baker William 2008 Harold Pinter Writers Lives Series London and New York Continuum International Publishing Group ISBN 978 0 8264 9970 7 Baker William Ross John C 2005 Harold Pinter A Bibliographical History London British Library and New Castle DE ISBN 1 58456 156 4 Batty Mark 2005 About Pinter The Playwright and the Work London Faber and Faber ISBN 0 571 22005 3 Begley Varun 2005 Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism Toronto University of Toronto Press ISBN 978 0 8020 3887 6 Billington Michael 2007 Harold Pinter London Faber and Faber ISBN 978 0 571 19065 2 Fraser Antonia 2010 Must You Go My Life with Harold Pinter London Weidenfeld amp Nicolson Orion Books ISBN 978 0 297 85971 0 Gale Steven H 2003 Sharp Cut Harold Pinter s Screenplays and the Artistic Process Lexington University Press of Kentucky ISBN 0 8131 2244 9 Gordon Lois ed 2001 Pinter at 70 A Casebook Casebooks on Modern Dramatists 2 ed New York and London Routledge ISBN 978 0 415 93630 9 Grimes Charles 2005 Harold Pinter s Politics A Silence Beyond Echo Madison amp Teaneck NJ Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ISBN 0 8386 4050 8 Gussow Mel 1994 Conversations with Pinter London Nick Hern Books ISBN 978 1 85459 201 9 Hern Nicholas Pinter Harold February 1985 A Play and Its Politics A Conversation between Harold Pinter and Nicholas Hern Harold Pinter One for the Road New York Grove pp 5 23 ISBN 0 394 62363 0 Hudgins Christopher C 2008 Gillen Francis Gale Steven H eds Three Unpublished Harold Pinter Filmscripts The Pinter Review Nobel Prize Europe Theatre Prize Volume 2005 2008 Tampa University of Tampa Press 132 39 ISSN 0895 9706 OCLC 16878624 Karwowski Michael 1 November 2003 Harold Pinter a Political Playwright The Contemporary Review Oxford 291 96 ISSN 0010 7565 OCLC 1564974 Archived from the original on 12 January 2009 Merritt Susan Hollis 1995 Pinter in Play Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter Durham and London Duke University Press ISBN 978 0 8223 1674 9 Merritt Susan Hollis 2000 Gillen Francis Gale Steven H eds Harold Pinter s Ashes to Ashes Political Personal Echoes of the Holocaust The Pinter Review Collected Essays 1999 and 2000 Tampa University of Tampa Press 73 84 ISSN 0895 9706 OCLC 16878624 Merritt Susan Hollis 2002 Gillen Francis Gale Steven H eds Talking about Pinter Collected Essays 2001 and 2002 The Pinter Review Collected Essays 2003 and 2004 Tampa University of Tampa Press 144 467 ISSN 0895 9706 OCLC 16878624 Merritt Susan Hollis 2004 Gillen Francis Gale Steven H eds Staging Pinter From Pregnant Pauses to Political Cause The Pinter Review Collected Essays 2003 and 2004 Tampa University of Tampa Press 123 43 ISSN 0895 9706 OCLC 16878624 Munder Peter 2008 Gillen Francis Gale Steven H eds Endgame with Spools Harold Pinter in Krapp s Last Tape The Pinter Review Nobel Prize Europe Theatre Prize Volume 2005 008 Tampa University of Tampa Press 220 22 ISSN 0895 9706 OCLC 16878624 Pinter Harold 2000 Celebration and The Room Two Plays by Harold Pinter London Faber and Faber ISBN 978 0 571 20497 7 Pinter Harold 2005 Art Truth and Politics The Nobel Lecture London Faber and Faber ISBN 978 0 571 23396 0 Pinter Harold 2008 Introduction by Harold Pinter Nobel Laureate In Watkins G L ed Fortune s Fool The Man Who Taught Harold Pinter A Life of Joe Brearley Aylesbury Buckinghamshire UK TwigBooks in association with The Clove Club pp 7 9 ISBN 978 0 9547236 8 2 Pinter Harold 2009 Various Voices Sixty Years of Prose Poetry Politics 1948 2008 3 ed London Faber and Faber ISBN 978 0 571 24480 5 Quigley Austin E 2001 Pinter Politics and Postmodernmism I In Raby Peter ed The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 7 27 ISBN 978 0 521 65842 3 Watkins G L ed March 2009 The Clove s Lines The Newsletter of the Clove Club The Old Boys of Hackney Downs School 3 2 1 36 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Missing or empty title help Further readingEditions Pinter Harold Plays One The Birthday Party The Room The Dumb Waiter A Slight Ache The Hothouse A Night Out London Methuen 1983 ISBN 0 413 34650 1 Contains an introductory essay Writing for the Theatre Pinter Harold Plays Two The Caretaker The Collection The Lover Night School The Dwarfs London Eyre Methuen 1979 ISBN 0 413 37300 2 Contains an introductory essay Writing for Myself Pinter Harold Plays Three The Homecoming The Tea Party The Basement Landscape Silence London Eyre Methuen 1978 ISBN 0 413 38480 2Works of criticism Naismith Bill ed Harold Pinter Faber Critical Guide The Caretaker The Birthday Party The Homecoming London Faber and Faber 2000 ISBN 978 0 571 19781 1 Contains introductory essays and explanatory notes External links Wikiquote has quotations related to Harold Pinter Wikimedia Commons has media related to Harold Pinter Official website Works by Harold Pinter at Open Library Harold Pinter at IMDb Harold Pinter at the Internet Broadway Database International Harold Pinter Society Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association co publisher of The Pinter Review Harold Pinter at Granta collection of useful links Harold Pinter at guardian co uk The best of The Guardian s coverage including tributes reviews and articles from the archive periodically updated Harold Pinter in Times Topics at nytimes com periodically updated collection of news articles reviews commentaries photographs and Web resources from The New York Times Harold Pinter on The Mark Shenton Show TheatreVoice recorded on 21 February 2007 critics Michael Billington and Alastair Macaulay review Pinter s People and The Dumb Waiter director and actor Harry Burton talks about his experiences with Pinter Reputations Harold Pinter on TheatreVoice recorded on 14 October 2005 critical assessments by Michael Billington Dan Rebellato Charles Spencer and Ian Smith Working with Pinter 2007 film by Harry Burton Harold Pinter Interview British Library Online Gallery What s On British Library 8 September 2008 Pinter discusses his memories of postwar British theatre with Harry Burton Harold Pinter Nobel Luminaries Jewish Nobel Prize Winners on the Beit Hatfutsot The Museum of the Jewish People Website Harold Pinter on Nobelprize org List of Works Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Harold Pinter amp oldid 1152848159, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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