Pinter, Harold, 1930–, English dramatist. Born in Hackney in London's East End, he is the son of an English tailor of Eastern European Jewish ancestry, and studied at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Central School of Speech and Drama. One of the most important English playwrights of the last half of the 20th cent. and the most influential of his generation, Pinter writes what have been called "comedies of menace." Using apparently commonplace characters and settings, he invests his plays with an atmosphere of fear, horror, and mystery. The peculiar tension he creates often derives as much from the long silences between speeches as from the often curt, ambiguous, yet vividly vernacular speeches themselves. His austere language is extremely distinctive, as is the ominous unease it provokes, and he is one of the few writers to have an adjective—Pinteresque—named for him. His plays frequently concern struggles for power in which the issues are obscure and the reasons for defeat and victory undefined. He has won many prestigious honors, the crowning of which was the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Pinter began his theatrical career as an actor, touring with provincial repertory companies. He has continued to act throughout his career, working on stage, in films, and on radio and television. His first produced effort as a playwright, a one-act drama entitled The Room (1957), was followed such plays as The Birthday Party (1957, film 1967), The Dumb Waiter (1957), A Slight Ache (1958), and The Dwarfs (1960). Pinter adapted several of these and later plays for film. The Caretaker (1959, film 1963) was his first great commercial and critical success and was followed by numerous plays, including The Collection (1961), The Homecoming (1964, film 1969), Landscape (1967), Old Times (1970), No Man's Land (1974), Betrayal (1978, film 1981), A Kind of Alaska (1982), One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), Celebration (1999), and Remembrance of Things Past (2000). By and large, Pinter's later dramas, often more overtly political than his previous works, have been greeted with less critical acclaim than his earlier plays.

Pinter has written the screenplays for a number of other highly praised motion pictures as well, among them The Servant (1963), The Pumpkin Eater (1964), Accident (1966), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and The Handmaid's Tale (1987). His collected screenplays were published in 2000. He also has penned Mac—a Memoir (1969), several volumes of poetry, the novel The Dwarfs (1990), and a miscellany, Various Voices (1999). An active director of his own work and that of other contemporary dramatists, Pinter has overseen the productions of numerous plays as well as several films and television dramas.

A longtime political activist, Pinter has been a vigorous and vocal campaigner for human rights and an outspoken opponent of American and British involvement in the Iraq war. In 2005 he announced that he had retired from playwriting in order to focus on politics and his work for peace, but planned to continue writing poetry. He is married to the historian Lady Antonia Fraser.

Bibliography

See M. Gussow, Conversations with Pinter (1994); critical biography by M. Billington (1996); studies by W. Kerr (1967), M. Esslin (1967, 1970, 1973, 1984 repr. 1992), W. Baker and S. E. Tabachnick (1974), S. Sahai (1981), J. Klein (1985), S. H. Gale (1986) and as ed. (1990), H. Bloom, ed. (1987), E. Sakellaridou (1987), L. Gordon, ed. (1990), C. Misra (1992), K. H. Burkman and J. L. Kundert-Gibbs, ed. (1993), R. Knowles (1995), M. S. Regal (1995), D. K. Peacock (1997), P. Prentice (2000), M. Batty (2001), L. G. Gordon, ed. (2001), and I. Smith (2003 and 2005).

Pinter, Harold

(born Oct. 10, 1930, London, Eng.) British playwright. Born into a working-class family, he acted with touring companies until 1959. His early one-act plays were followed by the full-length The Birthday Party (1958). His next major plays, The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965), established his reputation as an innovative and complex dramatist, sometimes considered as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd. He often used disjointed small talk and lengthy pauses in dialogue to convey a character's thought, which often contradicts his speech. Pinter's later plays include Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975), Betrayal (1978; film, 1983), Mountain Language (1988), and Moonlight (1993). He also wrote radio and television plays as well as screenplays for The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and The Handmaid's Tale (1990). In 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.