Harold Pinter

Origins and early life

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, east London, on 10 October 1930, the only child of British Jewish parents of eastern European descent: his father Hyman, known as Jack, was a ladies' tailor and his mother Frances, née Moskowitz, kept the house.

Work and career

A family legend passed down by an aunt held that they were Sephardi refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and Pinter signed early poems Pinta or da Pinto; his second wife, the historian Antonia Fraser, later established that three grandparents came from Poland and the fourth from Odesa. He was evacuated to Cornwall and to Reading during the Blitz, and his biographer Michael Billington traced the loneliness and separation that run through the plays to those years.

At Hackney Downs School an English master, Joseph Brearley, cast him as Romeo and Macbeth and walked him around the borough talking about literature; he began writing poetry at twelve. He entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948, hated it and left, and was twice prosecuted and fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector. His first play, The Room, was staged in 1957. The Birthday Party closed after eight performances in 1958 and was rescued by a single admiring review from Harold Hobson.

What critics came to call the Pinter pause — the menace ordinary speech carries, and the silence around it — runs through The Homecoming (1964), No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978). He wrote screenplays too, among them The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant's Woman, and directed some fifty productions. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and died in London on 24 December 2008.