A tailor’s son in Hackney
Harold Pinter was born on 10 October 1930 in Hackney, in the East End of London, the only child of British Jewish parents of Eastern European descent. His father, Hyman “Jack” Pinter, was a ladies’ tailor; his mother, Frances, née Moskowitz, kept the home, a solid red-brick villa just off the busy Lower Clapton Road. As a young man Pinter believed a family legend, told by an aunt, that the Pinters were Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition, and he signed some early poems “Pinta”. Research many years later by his second wife, the historian Antonia Fraser, showed the story was not true: three of his grandparents came from Poland and the fourth from Odesa, so the family was Ashkenazi.
The Second World War broke into his childhood. When it began he was evacuated from London, spending time in Cornwall and later Reading, and he returned to a city under bombardment. He later said the experience of wartime bombing never lost its hold on him. His official biographer, the critic Michael Billington, argued that the loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss of those years became themes that run through all of his work.
School, friendship and the stage
From 1944 to 1948 Pinter attended Hackney Downs School, a London grammar school, where he broke the school sprinting record, fell in love with cricket and formed friendships that lasted his whole life. His English teacher, Joseph Brearley, took him on long walks talking about literature and cast him as Romeo and as Macbeth in school productions. Under Brearley, Pinter shone at English, wrote for the school magazine and discovered that he could act. He began writing poetry at about twelve, and his poems first appeared outside school in the magazine Poetry London in 1950.
In 1948 he won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but disliked it and left after two terms. That same year he was called up for National Service. Disturbed by the Cold War, he refused as a conscientious objector, was prosecuted twice and fined, and was eventually registered as an objector. He later trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and spent most of the 1950s as a jobbing actor: touring Ireland with Anew McMaster’s Shakespeare company, playing in English repertory under the stage name David Baron, and working between jobs as a waiter, a postman, a bouncer and a snow clearer. He said his favourite roles were the sinister ones. Those years taught him, from the inside, how a scene is built and how an audience breathes.
The comedy of menace
Pinter’s first play, The Room, was written in three days in 1957 for a student production at the University of Bristol directed by his school friend Henry Woolf. His second, The Birthday Party, opened in London in 1958 and closed within a week after savage reviews. Only one critic, Harold Hobson of The Sunday Times, saw what was there, calling Pinter the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London. The Swedish Academy later described the play as a fiasco of legendary dimensions that became one of his most performed works. Success came with The Caretaker in 1960, which ran for 444 performances, and The Homecoming in 1965, which won the Tony Award for Best Play on Broadway in 1967.
Critics borrowed the phrase “comedy of menace” to describe what he was doing. A Pinter play usually starts with something ordinary: two people in a shabby room, a cup of tea, a conversation about nothing. Slowly the talk turns threatening. Strangers arrive, questions go unanswered, a character is bullied, flattered or broken, and the audience laughs and then stops laughing. The Nobel committee summed it up: he restored theatre to its basic elements, an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. His characters rarely say what they mean; the real drama is in what they avoid saying, and in his famous pauses and silences.
What his plays gave the world
Pinter changed how drama is written and how it is heard. Before him, stage dialogue in English was mostly neat and explanatory. He showed that the way real people talk, repeating themselves, dodging, interrupting, falling silent, could carry enormous tension, and that a single question about a pair of scissors could reveal a whole family’s struggle for power. His style became so recognisable that “Pinteresque” entered the English language as an adjective, used for any situation charged with unspoken threat. He disliked the word, but it shows how deeply his way of seeing has entered ordinary speech.
His plays are performed around the world, in many languages, and are studied in schools and drama courses. Later works moved through what critics call his “memory plays”, such as Old Times, No Man’s Land and Betrayal, which tells the story of an affair backwards and has been revived again and again. In the 1980s and 1990s he wrote short, direct plays about the abuse of power, including One for the Road and Mountain Language. The Swedish Academy saw a remarkable continuity: the political plays grew naturally out of his early study of threat and injustice. For actors and audiences, his work offers a lasting lesson in listening: in a Pinter play, as in life, the most important things are often not said aloud.
Screenwriter, director and actor
Pinter wrote 27 screenplays and film scripts. His partnership with the director Joseph Losey produced three classics of British cinema: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971). He adapted novels by Penelope Mortimer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Ian McEwan and others, and his screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), from John Fowles’s novel, solved the problem of an unfilmable book by setting a modern film-within-a-film beside the Victorian story. That script and his screenplay for Betrayal were both nominated for Academy Awards. His last filmed screenplay was Sleuth (2007), directed by Kenneth Branagh.
He was also a director of almost 50 productions for stage, film and television, including ten productions of plays by his friend Simon Gray, and he became an associate director of the National Theatre in 1973. He never stopped acting. Late in life, while being treated for cancer, he played the ruthless Minister in his own sketch Press Conference at the National Theatre, and in October 2006 he performed Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre from a motorised wheelchair, to sold-out houses.
Standing up for writers
The Swedish Academy noted that from 1973 Pinter had won recognition as a fighter for human rights alongside his writing. He was an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement, joining British artists in 1963 in refusing to allow professional productions of their work in South Africa. He was an officer of International PEN, the worldwide association of writers that defends freedom of expression.
In 1985 he travelled to Turkey with the American playwright Arthur Miller on a mission sponsored by International PEN together with a Helsinki Watch committee, to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers. They were met at the airport by the Turkish writers Orhan Pamuk and Gündüz Vassaf, spoke with victims of political repression and their families, and took their complaints to the American embassy in Ankara, where Pinter’s protest led to his being asked to leave. What he learned there, including the suppression of the Kurdish language, helped inspire Mountain Language (1988), a short play in which prisoners’ families are forbidden to speak their own tongue. Pinter insisted it was not only about Turkey: throughout history, he said, many languages have been banned. The play is still performed as a reminder that silencing a language is a form of oppression.
Jewish roots and a secular outlook
Pinter grew up in one of London’s great Jewish neighbourhoods, among the children of immigrants. The Swedish Academy recorded that growing up he met with expressions of antisemitism, and that he had indicated its importance in his becoming a dramatist. The Jewish Virtual Library notes that these early experiences had a deep impact on his writing. His closest teenage friends from Hackney Boys’ Club, among them Henry Woolf, Mick Goldstein and Moishe Wernick, remained central to his life.
He was not religious. He described himself as an atheist and was an honorary associate of the National Secular Society, and his funeral was a secular ceremony. He seldom wrote directly about Jewish life, though Ashes to Ashes (1996) alludes to the atrocities of the Holocaust. In later life he was a sharp critic of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinians and signed the founding statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians in 2005.
The man and his politics
Pinter was married first to the actress Vivien Merchant, from 1956 to 1980; their son, Daniel, was born in 1958 and later took the surname Brand. In 1980 he married Antonia Fraser, with whom he lived happily for more than three decades and to whom he dedicated many poems. He found it funny that a writer of plays full of cruelty and betrayal should enjoy such contentment. Drama, he told an interviewer, is about conflict and disarray: he had never been able to write a happy play, but he had been able to enjoy a happy life. He loved cricket above almost everything and chaired the Gaieties Cricket Club.
In his last 25 years he spoke out more and more on politics. He strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he used his Nobel lecture to criticise American foreign policy. His views and his blunt language, including his support for a committee seeking a fair trial for Slobodan Milošević, drew strong criticism as well as admiration. He was appointed CBE in 1966, declined a knighthood in 1996 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002.
Last years and legacy
In December 2001 Pinter was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He kept working, directing, acting and writing poetry. On 13 October 2005 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature for plays that uncover the precipice under everyday prattle and force entry into oppression’s closed rooms. His Nobel lecture, “Art, Truth & Politics”, was pre-recorded and shown on video in Stockholm. He died of liver cancer in London on 24 December 2008, aged 78, and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. Broadway theatres dimmed their lights in his honour.
His legacy lives in the theatre and beyond it. In 2009 English PEN created the PEN Pinter Prize, shared each year between a writer of outstanding merit and an international writer of courage who has been persecuted for speaking out; the first such writer honoured was the Burmese comedian and poet Zarganar. In 2011 the Belarus Free Theatre, whose members had to be smuggled out of Minsk, toured Being Harold Pinter, a collage of his plays and letters from Belarusian prisoners. That same year London’s Comedy Theatre was renamed the Harold Pinter Theatre. Every new production of his plays still teaches audiences to hear the menace in polite words, and to notice who holds power in a room.
Sources & further reading
Harold Pinter, Biobibliographical Notes, NobelPrize.org · Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics, NobelPrize.org · Harold Pinter, Jewish Virtual Library · 2005 Nobel winner Pinter visited Turkey in protest in 1985, Hürriyet Daily News · PEN Pinter Prize, English PEN · Harold Pinter, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.