Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, 78, playwright, critic of war in Iraq
Oct. 30, 1930 — Dec. 24, 2008
LONDON (AP) — British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter — who produced some of his generation’s most influential dramas and later became a staunch critic of the U. S.-led war in Iraq — has died, his widow said Thursday. He was 78.
Pinter died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer, according to his second wife, Antonia Fraser.
In recent years he had seized the platform offered by his 2005 Nobel Literature Prize to denounce President Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the war in Iraq.
But he was best known for exposing the complexities of the emotional battlefield.
His writing featured cool, menacing pauses in dialogue that reflected his characters’ deep emotional struggles and spawned a new adjective found in several dictionaries: “Pinteresque.”
Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, “The Dwarfs,” in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays.
The working-class milieu of his first dramas reflected his early life as the son of a Jewish tailor from London’s East End.
Born Oct. 30, 1930, in the London neighborhood of Hackney, he was forced along with other children during World War II to evacuate to rural Cornwall in 1939. He was 14 before he returned. By then, he was entranced with Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway.
By 1950, Pinter had begun to publish poetry and appeared on stage as an actor. He began to write for the stage and published “The Room” in 1957.
A year later, his first major play, “The Birthday Party,” was produced in the West End.
In it, intruders enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt. He becomes violent, telling them, “You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind.”
The play closed after just one week to disastrous reviews, but Pinter continued to write and was most prolific between 1957 and 1965.
“Betrayal” (1978) was reportedly based on the disintegration of his marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, who appeared in many of his first plays.
Their marriage ended in 1980 after Pinter’s long affair with BBC presenter Joan Bakewell. He then married Fraser. Merchant died shortly afterward of alcoholism-related disease.
During the late 1980s, his work became more overtly political; he said he had a responsibility to pursue his role as “a citizen of the world in which I live, [and] insist upon taking responsibility.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the Nobel “a belated consecration of his immense work but also an homage to a man’s courage and commitment against all forms of barbarism.”
“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law,” Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than traveling to Stockholm.
Though he had been looking forward to giving the Nobel lecture — calling it “the longest speech I will ever have made” — he canceled his attendance at the ceremony and then announced he would skip the lecture as well on doctor’s advice.
In March 2005, Pinter announced his retirement as a playwright but created a radio play, “Voices,” that BBC broadcast to mark his 75th birthday.
“I have written 29 plays, and I think that’s really enough,” Pinter said. “I think the world has had enough of my plays.”
A son, Daniel, from his marriage to Merchant, survives.
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