Harold Pinter

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. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. One of the most important English playwrights of the last half of the 20th cent., 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, and yet vividly vernacular speeches themselves. His plays frequently concern struggles for power in which the issues are obscure and the reasons for defeat and victory undefined.

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 Dumbwaiter (1957), The Birthday Party (1958), A Slight Ache (1959), and The Dwarfs (1960). The Caretaker (1960) was Pinter's first great success and was followed by numerous plays, including The Collection (1962), The Homecoming (1965), Landscape (1968), Old Times (1970), Betrayal (1978), A Kind of Alaska (1982), One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and Celebration (1999). 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 also written the screenplays for a number of highly praised motion pictures, 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. Additionally, he has published Mac—a Memoir (1969), Poems (1971), the novel The Dwarfs (1990), and a writing miscellany, Various Voices (1999). Also an active director of his own work and that of other contemporary dramatists, Pinter has overseen the productions of numerous plays, two films, and a number of television dramas. He is married to the historian Lady Antonia Fraser.

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), and P. Prentice (2000).

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