Pinter, Harold 1930-
English dramatist

Born in London, the son of an East End tailor of Portuguese-Jewish ancestry (da Pinta), he studied for a short time at RADA, then the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He became a repertory actor and wrote poetry and later plays. His first London production, The Birthday Party (1959), was trounced by critics unused to his highly personal dramatic idiom. A superb verbal acrobat, he exposes and utilizes the illogical and inconsequential in everyday talk to induce an atmosphere of menace in The Birthday Party, or of claustrophobic isolation in The Caretaker (1958, filmed 1963). His television play The Lover (1963) won the Italia Prize. Other early plays include The Collection (television 1961, stage 1962), The Dwarfs (radio 1960, stage 1963), and The Homecoming (1965). His filmscripts include The Servant (1963) and The Pumpkin Eaters (1964). Later plays include No Man's Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978), the story of an adulterous relationship told in reverse chronological order. He did not produce another full-length play until Party Time (1991) which was followed by Moonlight (1993). Three short pieces, under the title Other Voices, were shown at the National Theatre, London, in 1982, whilst Pinter was associate director there (1973-83). One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988), both about 25 minutes in length, and A New World Order (1990), deal with explicitly political themes. More recent filmscripts include The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), from the novel by John Fowles, The Handmaid's Tale (1987), from the novel by Margaret Atwood, and The Comfort of Strangers (1990), from the novel by Ian McEwan. In 1991 he helped launch a campaign against the celebration of Columbus's 'discovery' of America.

Bibliography: Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996); G Almansi and S Henderson, Harold Pinter (1983)