Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter (Hackney, London, 1930 – London, 2008) was an English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor, and one of the most influential British dramatists of the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote for the stage for more than fifty years and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. He matters because he reshaped the sound of British theatre, using pauses, silences and dialogue that says less than it seems to.

He was born on 10 October 1930 in Hackney, east London, the only child of a lower-middle-class Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. His father worked as a ladies' tailor and his mother kept house. For a long time he accepted a family story, passed on by an aunt, that linked them to Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition. His second wife, Antonia Fraser, later showed that the tale was unfounded: three of his grandparents came from Poland and the fourth from Odesa, so the family was Ashkenazi. His early poems sometimes appeared under the pseudonyms Pinta or da Pinto, a nod to that myth. During the Second World War, after the Blitz, he was evacuated to Cornwall and Reading, an experience his biographer Michael Billington sees as feeding the loneliness, bewilderment and loss that run through his work.

At Hackney Downs School he found his voice. He excelled at English, published poems in the school magazine and performed in plays directed by his teacher Joseph Brearley, with whom he would walk and talk about literature. He was also a fast runner and a keen cricketer, a sport he followed for the rest of his life. After a brief stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which he left without finishing, he faced national service and refused it as a conscientious objector, for which he was fined. He then trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and spent years acting in repertory companies in Ireland and England, for a time under the stage name David Baron. To make ends meet he worked as a waiter, postman and porter while he wrote.

His playwriting career began in 1957 with a production of The Room. That same year The Birthday Party opened, closed quickly and was nonetheless praised by some critics. Reviewers called his early plays "comedy of menace", a label that captures his talent for unease hidden inside ordinary conversation. Later works such as No Man's Land and Betrayal became associated with "memory plays", in which the past surfaces in fragments that cannot quite be trusted. He also wrote for film and adapted others' novels for the screen, including The Servant, and directed dozens of productions across stage, radio, television and cinema.

His style is recognised by clipped dialogue, loaded silences and characters who attack or defend themselves with words that hide their real aims. Recurring concerns include power, threat, memory, male loyalty and the dynamics of couples. He was married to the actress Vivien Merchant from 1956 until 1980, the year he married Antonia Fraser. After a cancer diagnosis in 2001 he kept working, and in 2006 he performed Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape for a Royal Court anniversary season. He died of liver cancer on 24 December 2008.

His legacy is twofold: he became a touchstone for later British dramatists, and his theatre of ambiguity continues to be staged around the world. The Nobel Prize in 2005 confirmed that his work had reached well beyond British stages.