In 1957, at the urging of his mate Henry Woolf, a 27-year-old
Harold Pinter penned his first play. It was called The
Roomand Pinter claimed to have written it in four days,
although Woolf suggests it was finished in two. It was staged as a
student production at the University of Bristol, with Woolf as
director, before transferring to a season at the National Student
Drama Festival. It was seen by the London Sunday Times drama critic
Harold Hobson and attracted the attention of young producer Michael
Codron, who presented Pinter's second play The Birthday
Partyat the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958.
This was the start of one of the most influential playwriting
careers of the 20th century. From his first play Pinter displayed
some of the characteristics for which he became so famous: the
black humour, the fascination with language, the penchant for
pauses, the questioning. Pinter wrote about people, their fears and
their flaws. He wrote about marriage and friendship, parents and
their children. He often introduced strangers to his simple but
strange domestic scenarios and was unafraid of violence.
When Pinter first waded into the inky depths of playwriting, he was
working as an actor and had recently married actress Vivian
Marchant, who performed in the first productions of some of her
husband's early plays. While Pinter's playwriting career flourished
in the following decades, his marriage to Marchant crumbled and
finally ended in 1975 when - five days after the opening of No
Man's Landat the Old Vic Theatre in London - he left
her for Antonia Fraser.
Five years later, on the finalisation of his divorce to Marchant,
Pinter married Fraser. Marchant died of alcoholism in 1982 and her
son with Pinter, Daniel, born in 1958, became a musician and
songwriter and was estranged from his father. He cast off the name
Pinter and refused to attend his father's funeral.
In addition to playwriting, Pinter worked throughout his life as an
actor, primarily on stage but occasionally also in film and
television. Despite being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in
2001, he continue to act until 2006 when he made his final stage
appearance in the title character of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's
Last Tape. He was also a prolific theatre director,
particularly from the 1970s onwards, often directing his own work,
and was a highly regarded screenwriter responsible for 27 film
scripts including The Handmaid's Tale, The French Lieutenant's
Woman, The Remains of the Day, Lolitaand Betrayal.
The French Lieutenant's Womanand Betrayalwere
both nominated for Academy Awards.
Pinter was awarded in many ways throughout his life, with notable
honours including 20 honorary degrees, the BAFTA Fellowship in
1997, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1966
and Companion of Honour in 2002 (despite having declined a
knighthood in 1996), and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 for
his body of work.
Pinter was a passionate participant in and observer of the game of
cricket (so much so that he named the four characters in No
Man's Landafter four greats of English county cricket: George
Hirst, Reggie Spooner, Johnny Briggs and Frank Foster), he was also
intensely political. He was always vocal about his views. As a
young man he became a conscientious objector and refused to join
the National Service during the Cold War at the age of 18. Later in
life he expressed his views through essays and interviews, drawing
widespread criticism and causing some of his detractors to suggest
he should not have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Pinter died of liver cancer on 24 December, 2008, in London,
England.
Alex Lalak
Feature: The life of Pinter
Date posted: 20 Nov 2011Author: STC