Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party, The Homecoming and Betrayal. 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. He died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008 at the age of 80.

About Harold Pinter in brief

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party, The Homecoming and Betrayal. 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 at the age of 80. P inter 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 married actress Vivien Merchant in 1956 and had a son, Daniel, born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980. His career as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957. His screenplay adaptations of others’ works include The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Trial, and Sleuth. He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others’ work.

His early works were described by critics as \”comedy of menace\”. Later plays such as No Man’s Land and Betraysal became known as \”memory plays\”. He also undertook a number of roles in works by other writers. He directed nearly 50 productions for stage, theatre and screen. In 1947, he played Romeo and Macbeth in productions directed by Joseph Brearley. In 1950, his first poetry was published in the Hackney School Magazine, and he first wrote for English magazine in 1947, in spring 1947. He believed an aunt’s erroneous view that the family was Sephardic and had fled the Spanish Inquisition; thus, for his early poems, Pinta and at other times used variations such as da Pinto. His 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\”. In 1940 and 1941, after the Blitz, the Pinter’s family was evacuated from their house in London to Cornwall and Reading. He formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male male friendship. The friends he made in those days—most particularly Henry Woolf and Michael Goldstein—have always been a vital part of the emotional texture of his life. In 1947 he wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting.

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