Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, east London, the only child of a Jewish ladies’ tailor and his wife. At Hackney Downs School he acted, wrote poetry and was a keen sprinter and cricketer. He briefly attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, was fined as a conscientious objector for refusing national service, and spent the 1950s as a jobbing actor in repertory theatre in Ireland and England, for some years under the stage name David Baron.

His first play, The Room, was staged in 1957. The Birthday Party closed within a week in London the following year, but The Caretaker (1960) made his reputation, and The Homecoming confirmed it. Critics called these early works comedies of menace: a confined space, an intruder, and dialogue whose evasions, repetitions and silences carry the real action. Later plays such as No Man’s Land and Betrayal, which tells the story of an affair in reverse, turned toward memory. He also wrote many screenplays, including The Servant and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and directed for the stage.

From the 1980s Pinter’s work became openly political, in short plays such as One for the Road and Mountain Language, and he spoke forcefully against human rights abuses and the war in Iraq. He married the historian Antonia Fraser in 1980. Ill with cancer, he gave his Nobel lecture on video. He acted until 2006, last appearing in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and died in London in 2008.