Profile of Harold Pinter on Famous Like Me

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (born October 10, 1930) is a British playwright and theatre director. He has written for theatre, radio, television and film. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.

Early life

Pinter was born in Hackney in London to working class Jewish parents. He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar school and, briefly, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). He published poetry as a young man.

Career

Pinter began working in the theatre as an actor, under the stage name David Baron. His first play, The Room, was first performed by Bristol University students in 1957.

His second play (which is today one of his best-known), The Birthday Party (1958), was initially a flop, despite a positive review in the Sunday Times by leading theatre critic Harold Hobson. But after the success of The Caretaker in 1960, which established him, The Birthday Party was revived, and this time was well received.

These plays, and other early works such as The Homecoming (1964), have sometimes been labelled as displaying the "comedy of menace". They often take an apparently innocent situation, and reveal it as a threatening and absurd one because of characters acting in ways which may seem inexplicable both to the audience and, at times, to other characters. Pinter's work was marked by the influence of Samuel Beckett from the earliest works onwards, and the two men became long-standing friends.

Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre in 1973. His later plays tend to be shorter, often appearing as allegories of oppression.

He has been nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay twice ("The French Lieutenant's Woman" -1981 and "Betrayal" -1983.)

In 2005 he announced that he was retiring from writing plays to dedicate himself to political campaigning.

Political campaigning

In 1985 Pinter travelled to Turkey with the American playwright Arthur Miller and met many victims of political oppression there. At an American embassy function honouring Miller, instead of exchanging pleasantries, Pinter spoke of people having an electric current applied to their genitals—which got him thrown out. (Miller, in support, left the embassy with him.) Pinter's experience of oppression in Turkey and the suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language.

Pinter opposed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He famously called President Bush a mass murderer and Blair a 'deluded idiot'. He frequently writes political letters to British newspapers. He has likened the Bush administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying the U.S. was charging towards world domination while the American public and the United Kingdom's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched.

Pinter has been a champion of freedom of expression for many years through his association with International PEN. In 1985, he joined US playwright Arthur Miller on an International PEN-Helsinki Watch Committee mission to Turkey to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers.

Pinter is also an active delegate of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that defends Cuba's rights abused by Fidel Castro's regime and campaigns against the U.S. embargo on the country, and a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević, an organization that appeals for the freedom of Slobodan Milošević.

Honours

Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 (having previously declined a knighthood).

On October 13, 2005 the Swedish Academy announced Pinter was the recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, stating that, "in his plays [he] uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".

Miscellaneous

Pinter is the chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club. He is also an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

On October 13, 2005 (the day his Nobel Prize was announced) Pinter was erroneously reported dead on a cable television channel. (This may have been because he has been suffering from cancer for several years, and also injured his head in a fall shortly before the report.)

Works

Plays

• The Room (1957)
• The Birthday Party (1957)
• The Dumb Waiter (1957)
• A Slight Ache (1958)
• The Hothouse (1958)
• The Caretaker (1959)
• A Night Out (1959)
• Night School (1960)
• The Dwarfs (1960)
• The Collection (1961)
• The Lover (1962)
• Tea Party (1964)
• The Homecoming (1964)
• The Basement (1966)
• Landscape (1967)
• Silence (1968)
• Old Times (1970)
• Monologue (1972)
• No Man's Land (1974)
• Betrayal (1978)
• Family Voices (1980)
• Other Places (1982)
• A Kind of Alaska (1982)
• Victoria Station (1982)
• One For The Road (1984)
• Mountain Language (1988)
• The New World Order (1991)
• Party Time (1991)
• Moonlight (1993)
• Ashes to Ashes (1996)
• Celebration (1999)
• Remembrance of Things Past (2000)

Sketches

• The Black and White (1959)
• Trouble in the Works (1959)
• Last to Go (1959)
• Request Stop (1959)
• Special Offer (1959)
• That's Your Trouble (1959)
• That's All (1959)
• Interview (1959
• Applicant (1959)
• Dialogue Three (1959)
• Night (1969)
• Precisely (1983)
• Press Conference (2002)

Radio

• Voices (2005)

Films

• The Caretaker (1963)
• The Servant (1963)
• The Pumpkin Eater (1963)
• The Quiller Memorandum (1965)
• Accident (1966)
• The Birthday Party (1967)
• The Go-Between (1969)
• The Homecoming (1969)
• Langrishe Go Down (1970) (adapted for TV 1978)
• The Proust Screenplay (1972)
• The Last Tycoon (1974)
• The French Lieutenant's Woman (1980)
• Betrayal (1981)
• Victory (1982)
• Turtle Diary (1984)
• The Handmaid's Tale (1987)
• Reunion (1988)
• Heat of the Day (1988)
• Comfort of Strangers (1989)
• The Trial (1989)
• The Dreaming Child (1997)
• The Tragedy of King Lear (2000)

Prose

• Kullus (1949)
• The Dwarfs (1952-56)
• Latest Reports from the Stock Exchange (1953)
• The Black and White (1954-55)
• The Examination (1955)
• Tea Party (1963)
• The Coast (1975)
• Problem (1976)
• Lola (1977)
• Short Story (1995)
• Girls (1995)
• Sorry About This (1999)
• God's District (1997)
• Tess (2000)
• Voices in the Tunnel (2001)

Poetry

• Poems (1971)
• I Know the Place (1977)
• Poems and Prose 1949-1977 (1978)
• Ten Early Poems (1990)
• 100 Poems by 100 Poets (1992)
• Collected Poems and Prose (1995)
• "The Disappeared" and Other Poems (2002)
• War (2003)

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