Hailed as ‘one of the most important playwrights of our day', Harold Pinter has achieved international success as one of the most complex post World War II dramatists. His first play The Room (1957) contained many of the elements that would characterise his later work, that is; a commonplace situation gradually invested with menace and mystery through the deliberate omission of an explanation or motivation for the action.
The son of a Jewish tailor, Harold Pinter was born in the working class area of Haney, East End of London on 10 October 1930. During World War II he was evacuated from London and did not return until he was fourteen, the experience making an indelible impression on the young boy. In 1949 at the age of 19 his stand as a conscientious objector led to Pinter being fined thirty pounds by a magistrate for refusing to do his national service. Regardless of, or maybe because of, his pacifist stance, Pinter has remained politically concerned particularly in the area of human rights issues. After a journey to Turkey with Arthur Miller, in 1985, he expressed his outrage at such events as the persecution of political prisoners. The following year he formed a left-wing discussion group with his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser and a group of other writers called the June 20th Society.
Pinter's interest in literature and drama began at Hackney Downs Grammar School where he enjoyed the works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway and acted in school productions. Pinter went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but left before graduating to undertake an acting career using the stage name David Baron. It was only after travelling around Ireland in a Shakespearean company and years working in provincial repertory that Pinter decided to turn his attention to playwriting. The first two one-act plays that he wrote were The Room and The Dumbwaiter (1957). These plays founded the mood of comic menace and uncertainty that characterize his plays and which has kept scholars and critics hard at work deciphering. The Dumbwaiter has two hired killers waiting to murder an unknown victim.The brilliant small talk behind which the two men hide their growing anxiety is wildly comic and terrifying in its absurdity in the manner of that combines the styles of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.
Pinter's first full-length play The Birthday Party (1958), the story of an apparently ordinary man being threatened by strangers for an unknown reason, did not become a success until it was turned into a film in 1968 and then revived for stage. Pinter's reputation rests on a body of work that has been described as ‘Pinteresque', as a means to describe the type of colloquial speech embodied in the faltering, pause-ridden dialogue of his characters, and the world of nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred, mental disturbance and struggle for survival or identity.
Pinter hasn't confined his skills to the theatre, he has also had performances on radio, television and film. His screen plays include The Last Tycoon (1974 dir. By Elia Kazan), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981 novel by John Fowles), and The Handmaid's Tale (1990 novel by Margaret Atwood). He has also had novels, poems and articles printed in all media forms.
His numerous awards include: the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear (1963), BAFTA awards (1965 and 1971), the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize (1970), the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or (1971)and the Commonwealth Award (1981). In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the age of 71 he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and began chemotherapy. Harold Pinter lives in London with his writer and historian wife Lady Antonia Fraser.