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You can read more about Pinter on the Harold Pinter Official
WebSite
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Playwright Harold Pinter was born in Hackney,
London, on 10 October 1930. He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar
School and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Central
School of Speech and Drama.
His plays include The Room (1957), The Birthday Party
(1958), The Dumb Waiter (1959), The Caretaker (1960),
The Lover (1962), The Homecoming (1965), No Man's Land
(1975), Mountain Language (1988), Moonlight (1993),
Ashes to Ashes (1996) and Celebration (2000), first performed
with The Room at the Almeida Theatre in London. His adaptation of
Marcel Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past was performed at
the National Theatre in London in 2000. He has adapted many of his stage
plays for radio and television and he has written the screenplays to a
number of films including The Servant (1963), The Quiller
Memorandum (1965), The Go-Between (1970), The Last Tycoon
(1974) and The Comfort of Strangers (1989), adapted from Ian
McEwan's novel. He has directed many productions of his own plays as
well as plays by other writers, including James Joyce, Noel Coward,
Tennessee Williams, David Mamet and Simon Gray, and has acted on stage,
film, television and radio.
He was awarded a CBE in 1966, the German Shakespeare Prize in 1970, the
Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1973 and the David Cohen
British Literature Prize in 1995, and holds honorary degrees from the
Universities of Reading, Glasgow, East Anglia and Bristol, among others.
In 2001 he was awarded the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award by the English
Centre of International PEN. His most recent publication, War
(2003), is a collection of eight poems and one speech inspired by the
subject of conflict.
Harold Pinter is married to the writer Lady Antonia Fraser
and lives in London. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
Unsigned biography
found on the British Council Contemporary Writers WebSite
Pinter's major plays originate often from a
single, powerful visual image. They are usually set in a single room,
whose occupants are threatened by forces or people whose precise
intentions neither the characters nor the audience can define. The
struggle for survival or identity dominates the action of his
characters. Language is not only used as a means of communication but as
a weapon. Beneath the words, there is a silence of fear, rage and
domination, fear of intimacy. |