Nobel Prize-Winning Playwright Harold Pinter Dead at 78 | Fox News Nobel Prize-Winning Playwright Harold Pinter Dead at 78 Published December 25, 2008 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 Email Print LONDON – Harold Pinter, praised as the most influential British playwright of his generation and a longtime voice of political protest, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 78. Pinter, whose distinctive contribution to the stage was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on Wednesday, according to his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser. "Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said when it announced Pinter's award. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution." The Nobel Prize gave Pinter a global platform which he seized enthusiastically to denounce U.S. President George W. Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"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. "How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?" he asked, in a hoarse voice. Weakened by cancer and bandaged from a fall on a slippery pavement, Pinter seemed a vulnerable old man when he emerged from his London home to speak about the Nobel Award. Though he had been looking forward to giving a Nobel lecture — "the longest speech I will ever have made" — he first canceled plans to attend the awards, then announced he would skip the lecture as well on his doctor's advice. Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, "The Dwarfs," in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays including "The Quiller Memorandum" (1965) and "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1980). He admitted, and said he deeply regretted, voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997.

Pinter fulminated against what he saw as the overweening arrogance of American power, and belittled Blair as seeming like a "deluded idiot" in support of Bush's war in Iraq. In his Nobel lecture, Pinter accused the United States of supporting "every right-wing military dictatorship in the world" after World War II. "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them," he said. The United States, he added, "also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain." Most prolific between 1957 and 1965, Pinter relished the juxtaposition of brutality and the banal and turned the conversational pause into an emotional minefield. His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives are set against the neat lives they have constructed in order to try to survive. Usually enclosed in one room, they organize their lives as a sort of grim game and their actions often contradict their words. Gradually, the layers are peeled back to reveal the characters' nakedness.

The protection promised by the room usually disappears and the language begins to disintegrate. Pinter once said of language, "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness." Pinter's influence was felt in the United States in the plays of Sam Shepard and David Mamet and throughout British literature. "With his earliest work, he stood alone in British theater up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers too," British playwright Tom Stoppard said when the Nobel Prize was announced. "Not only has Harold Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature, by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension," added British playwright David Hare, who also writes politically charged dramas.

The working-class milieu of plays like "The Birthday Party" and "The Homecoming" reflected Pinter's early life as the son of a Jewish tailor from London's East End. He began his career in the provinces as an actor. In his first major play, "The Birthday Party" (1958), 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." And in "The Caretaker," a manipulative old man threatens the fragile relationship of two brothers while "The Homecoming" explores the hidden rage and confused sexuality of an all-male household by inserting a woman. In "Silence and Landscape," Pinter moved from exploring the dark underbelly of human life to showing the simultaneous levels of fantasy and reality that equally occupy the individual. In the 1980s, Pinter's only stage plays were one-acts: "A Kind of Alaska" (1982), "One for the Road" (1984) and the 20-minute "Mountain Language" (1988).

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." In March 2005 Pinter announced his retirement as a playwright to concentrate on politics. But he created a radio play, "Voices," that was broadcast on BBC radio 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." Pinter had a son, Daniel, from his marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, which ended in divorce in 1980. That year he married the writer Fraser. "It was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten," Fraser said. Advertisement Nobel prize winning dramatist Harold Pinter dies | Culture | The Guardian Close This article is 8 years old The Nobel laureate Harold Pinter , one of the greatest playwrights of his generation, has died. Pinter, who was suffering from cancer, died yesterday aged 78.

His second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said in a statement to the Guardian: "He was a great man, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten." Pinter had a number of awards bestowed on him during a long and distinguished career, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. In its citation, the Nobel academy said Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century" and declared him to be an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms". Pinter was best know for his plays, including his 1960 breakthrough production The Caretaker, The Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party. But he was also a screenwriter, actor and director and in recent years a vociferous campaigner against human rights abuses, including the occupation of Iraq by western armed forces. He joined other artists such as Blur and Ken Loach in sending a letter to Downing Street opposing the 2003 invasion.

In 2004 he received the Wilfred Owen award for poetry for a collection of work criticising the war in Iraq. His screenplays for film and television, included the 1981 movie The French Lieutenant's Woman based on John Fowles' novel. He also wrote the screenplay for The Comfort of Strangers (1989), adapted from Ian McEwan's novel, and adapted many of his own stage plays for radio and television. 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. He was also awarded a number of honorary degrees. Pinter was born into a Jewish family in the London borough of Hackney. His grandparents had fled persecution in Poland and Odessa. He was attracted to acting from an early age and his political activism was evident when in 1948 he refused, as a conscientious objector, to do National Service.

After two spells at drama school he joined he joined Anew McMaster's Shakespearean Irish touring company in 1951 and wrote his first play, The Room, for Bristol University's recently established drama department in 1957. His agent said a private funeral would be held and a memorial service open to all. The most provocative, poetic and influential playwright of his generation Published: 25 Dec 2008 Harold Pinter (1930-2008) on "Art, Truth and Politics" 1/2 on Democracy now 12/30/08 - YouTube Harold Pinter (1930-2008) on "Art, Truth and Politics" 1/2 on Democracy now 12/30/08 Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Uploaded on Dec 30, 2008 Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor and political activist died last week at the age of seventy-eight after a prolonged battle with cancer. In his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Pinter excoriated US foreign policy. 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. We play an excerpt from his speech. Read and listen: Nobel Laureate playwright Harold Pinter dies - Telegraph Nobel Laureate playwright Harold Pinter dies Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright and political activist, has died of liver cancer aged 78.

Image 1 of 2 Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser at Anthony Dymoke Powell Memorial at Grosvenor Chapel in 2002 Photo: Evening Standard Pinter was widely accepted as one of the world's greatest playwrights Photo: PA By Alastair Jamieson 2:10PM GMT 25 Dec 2008 The writer and poet penned more than 30 plays, including The Caretaker and The Birthday Party, His style of dialogue, with its long pauses and disconnected conversation, was so distinctive that the word "Pinteresque" entered the Oxford English Dictionary. His wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said: “He was a great, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years.” The east London-born playwright had been due to pick up an honorary degree earlier this month from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London but was forced to withdraw due to illness. After an early struggle for recognition he became widely accepted as one of the world's greatest playwrights after winning acclaim for works including The Birthday Party and Betrayal.

Related Articles Harold Pinter: An original, stylish and enigmatic writer 25 Dec 2008 Pinter was well-known for his left-wing political views and was a vociferous critic of US and UK foreign policy, voicing opposition on a number of issues including the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. Tim Walker, theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph, said: “This was a man who had plays with long silences, where characters did not always go anywhere – very much like real life. He brought a realism to the business.” Michael Billington, Pinter's friend and biographer, said the writer was a great man as well as a great playwright. He said Pinter would be remembered "above all as a man of generosity". Pinter was born in Hackney in 1930, the only son of immigrant Jews. His childhood was interrupted by the outbreak of the war in 1939 when he was evacuated from his Hackney home to rural Cornwall. He was 14 before he returned to the capital, by which point he had developed a love of the works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway.

As a young man he appeared in several school productions at Hackney Downs Grammar and later accepted a grant to study at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1949 he was fined by magistrates for refusing to complete his National Service. Pinter was a politically conscious man who turned down John Major's offer of a knighthood and hit out at Tony Blair when Nato bombed Serbia. Harold Pinter, Playwright And Nobel Laureate, Dies : NPR Harold Pinter, Playwright And Nobel Laureate, Dies Embed Embed Harold Pinter, Playwright And Nobel Laureate, Dies Harold Pinter, Playwright And Nobel Laureate, Dies Embed Embed British playwright and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter has died. He was 78. Pinter was known for his brooding portrayals of domestic life and his barbed politics. ROBERT, SIEGEL, host: From NPR News, this is All Things Considered. I'm Robert Siegel. Sir Harold Pinter, playwright and 2005 Nobel Laureate, has died.

Pinter was best known for such plays as "The Birthday Party" and "The Homecoming." He also adapted other people's work for the screen including, "The French Lieutenant's Woman." Pinter had long-suffered from esophageal cancer. His second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said that he died yesterday at age 78. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports. NEDA ULABY: When Harold Pinter won the Nobel prize for literature, he was barely strong enough to hold a press conference in London. Sir HAROLD PINTER (Playwright, Nobel Laureate): I've written a lot of plays. I've been writing plays since - for about 50 years, sorry. ULABY: Pinter had such trouble speaking, he was unable to enjoy the whirl of congratulatory interviews that normally follow a Nobel win. Pinter wrote dozens of plays and essays and poems, but his close friend, Henry Woolf, says Harold Pinter's major contribution to English letters was what became known as the Theater of Menace. Mr.

HENRY WOOLF (Actor, Director): People, for the first time in English drama, spoke in non-sequitors as if they hadn't heard what had just been said to them. They had heard perfectly well, but they didn't want to respond. So there were these strange pauses and silences. ULABY: Brutal pauses punctuate "The Birthday Party," a Pinter play from 1957. Two strangers invade a dreary English rooming house and cryptically interrogate its lonesome boarder. (Soundbite of play "The Birthday Party") Unidentified Actor #1 (as McCann): When did you come to this place? Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): Last year. Unidentified Actor #3 (as Goldberg): Where did you come from? Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): Somewhere else. Unidentified Actor #1 (as McCann): Why did you come here? Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): My feet hurt. Unidentified Actor #3 (as Goldberg): Why did you stay? Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): Had a headache. Unidentified Actor #1 (as McCann): Did you take anything for it?

Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): Yes. Unidentified Actor #3 (as Goldberg): What? Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): Fruit(ph) salts. Unidentified Actor #1 (as McCann): Enos(ph) or anti? Did you stir properly? Did they fizz? Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): No. Unidentified Actor #3 (as Goldberg): Did they fizz? Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): When? Unidentified Actor #1 (as McCann): Did they fizz, or didn't they fizz? Unidentified Actor #3 (as Goldberg): He doesn't know. Unidentified Actor #2 (as Stanley): I don't know. Unidentified Actor #1 (as McCann): When did you last have a bath? Mr. WOOLF: It was very, very sort of frightening in a way, but also hilariously funny. ULABY: Harold Pinter was born in 1930 in London's East End. His father was a tailor, the son of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in Eastern Europe. Pinter was evacuated from London as a child during World War II. He was traumatized by the experience and returned just in time for the blitz.

He watched as his house was destroyed by a bomb. Penelope Prentice is a playwright who has written a book on Pinter. Ms. PENELOPE PRENTICE (Playwright, Author, "The Pinter Ethic"): No other dramatist better understands and dramatizes the causes of human violence than Harold Pinter. And that's a big statement if you consider Shakespeare and the Greeks. ULABY: Before he became a playwright, Pinter acted Shakespeare in a repertory company alongside his first wife, Vivian Merchant. His specialty was villains, and later, he distilled human vice into poetry in his plays and films - for instance, "Betrayal." (Soundbite of "Betrayal") Ms. PATRICIA HODGE: (As Emma) Jerry. Mr. JEREMY IRONS: (As Jerry) I was best man at your wedding. ULABY: Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge in the 1983 film which traces a seven-year affair. (Soundbite of "Betrayal") Mr. IRONS: (As Jerry) I saw you in white. I watched you glide by in white. Ms.

HODGE: (As Emma) I wasn't in white. Mr. IRONS: (As Jerry) You (unintelligible) I should have. Ms. HODGE: (As Emma) What? Mr. IRONS: (As Jerry) I should have had you in your white before the wedding. I should have blackened you in your white wedding dress, blackened you in your bridal dress before ushering you into your wedding, as your best man. Ms. HODGE: (As Emma) My husband's best man, your best friend's best man. Mr. IRONS: (As Jerry) No, your best man. ULABY: The threat of power was one of Pinter's most consistent themes, and he tried to change not just how we view the world, but how we act in it. He committed himself to human rights, he said, after the 1973 assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende. More recently, Pinter was a truculent critic of the war in Iraq. Sir PINTER: I'm both deeply engaged in art and deeply engaged in politics, and sometimes those two meet, and sometimes they don't.

ULABY: Harold Pinter, after learning of his Nobel win. Before cancer got the better of his voice, and before it claimed his life, Pinter wrote a poem about his diagnosis. Sir PINTER: I need to see my tumor dead A tumor which forgets to die But plans to murder me instead. But I remember how to die Though all my witnesses are dead. But I remember what they said Of tumors which would render them As blind and dumb as they had been Before the birth of that disease Which brought the tumor into play. The black cells will dry up and die Or sing with joy and have their way. They breed so quietly night and day, You never know, they never say. ULABY: But in the end, Harold Pinter had the last word. Neda Ulaby, NPR News. Copyright © 2008 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc. , an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary.

The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. Nobel Prize-Winning Playwright Harold Pinter Dies Nobel Prize-Winning Playwright Harold Pinter Dies Embed Embed Harold Pinter (1930-2008) on "Art, Truth and Politics" | Democracy Now! Harold Pinter (1930-2008) on "Art, Truth and Politics" StoryDecember 30, 2008 Harold Pinter 2005 Nobel Prize speech Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor and political activist died last week at the age of seventy-eight after a prolonged battle with cancer. In his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Pinter excoriated US foreign policy. "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. We play an excerpt from his speech. [includes rush transcript] TRANSCRIPT This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, political activist, died last week at the age of seventy-eight after a prolonged battle with cancer. He’s considered one of the most influential and provocative dramatists of his generation, often compared to his friend and mentor, Samuel Beckett. Pinter’s well-known plays include The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Betrayal. The adjective "Pinteresque" is often used to describe situations marked by “halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity and an air of menace." Born in 1930 into a Jewish family in London that had fled persecution in Poland and Odessa, Pinter began his career as a stage actor and wrote his first play, The Room, in 1957. Pinter was also well known as a vociferous critic of British and American foreign policy and an activist against nuclear proliferation, political repression and censorship. As early as 1948, Harold Pinter resisted joining the British military national service and registered as a conscientious objector. Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, titled "Art, Truth, and Politics," he strongly denounced the United States, its actions in Iraq and its policy of backing groups like the Contras in Nicaragua. Today, we bring you an excerpt of "Art, Truth, and Politics." Harold Pinter gave the speech in December of 2005. He was too ill to go to Stockholm to receive the award, so it was videotaped, and this is what was broadcast around the world. HAROLD PINTER: The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over forty years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution. The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance, and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. 2,000 schools were built.

A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one-seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated. The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist-Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of healthcare and education and achieve social unity and national self-respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was, of course, at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador. I spoke earlier about “a tapestry of lies” which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon.” This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government: two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary.

The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954, and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships. Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright. The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance, but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty-stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country.

Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. “Democracy” had prevailed. But this “policy” was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened. The United States supported, and in many cases engendered, every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place, and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.

You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. I put to you that the United States is, without doubt, the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless, it may be, but it’s also very clever. As a salesman, it is out on its own, and its most saleable commodity is self-love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, “the American people,” as in the sentence, “I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people, and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.” It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words “American people” provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties, but it’s very comfortable.

This does not apply, of course, to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the two million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the United States. The United States no longer bothers about low-intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favor. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead: the pathetic and supine Great Britain. What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days — conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay: hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention.

It is not only tolerated, but hardly thought about, by what’s called the “international community.” This criminal outrage is being committed by a country which declares itself to be “the leader of the free world.” Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally, a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land, from which indeed they may never return. At present, many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said, “To criticize our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us.” So Blair shuts up. The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.

The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading, as a last resort — all other justifications having failed to justify themselves — as liberation; a formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. AMY GOODMAN: Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, his acceptance speech in 2005. He died Christmas Eve at the age of seventy-eight. The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License . Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Up Next Playwright's style changed theater - latimes Playwright's style changed theater December 26, 2008 |Mary Rourke | Rourke is a former Times staff writer Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning British playwright who addressed the isolation, fear and brutality of life in an original style that changed the face of 20th century theater, has died. He was 78. Pinter, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, died Wednesday, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, told the Associated Press in London. He had been in failing health in recent years, battling cancer of the esophagus as well as pemphigus, a rare autoimmune disease. His illness left him unable to travel from his home in London to Stockholm in December 2005 for the Nobel presentation. He sent a videotaped speech that was included in the ceremony. His publisher, Stephen Page of Faber & Faber, accepted the prize on Pinter's behalf. "Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Swedish Academy said in announcing that Pinter had been awarded the prize.

"It never occurred to me that I was a contender," Pinter told the Guardian of London in 2005. "I am very grateful." His Nobel lecture, which he videotaped in England to be screened at the ceremonies, was a scalding critique of U.S. and British policies in Iraq. Pinter was an outspoken pacifist throughout his adult life. Pinter referred to the invasion of Iraq by U.S. and British forces as "an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law." He went on to propose a speech he wrote that the U.S. president could deliver. It sounded like a rant from one of his gangster thug characters. It ends abruptly: "You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it." Menace and brutality in daily life -- between spouses, parents and children, and neighbors -- run through Pinter's plays like an electric current. Dialogue can be elliptical and unspecific, but it is often combative at the same time. "Pinter was without question the most influential English playwright of the postwar," New Yorker magazine critic John Lahr told The Times in 2005.

"He streamlined the nature of the stage and changed the way we hear language." Although Pinter is best known as a playwright, he was trained as an actor and performed in plays, movies and teleplays throughout his career. Along with about 30 plays, he wrote more than 20 screenplays, including adaptations of a number of his own works, such as "The Caretaker" (1963) and "Betrayal" (1983). He wrote other screenplays, among them "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981), from the novel by John Fowles, and "The Last Tycoon" (1976), based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel. Pinter's most famous plays -- "The Birthday Party," "The Caretaker" and "The Homecoming" -- move on spare dialogue that characters use like weapons against one another. Piercing language, significant pauses and an undercurrent of violence create an effect that was uniquely his when he introduced it.

Critics termed it "Pinteresque." "The essence of Pinter's singular appeal is that you sit down to every play he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected," playwright David Hare said in 2005. "You never know what the hell's coming next." Early in his career Pinter was compared to Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright, for the psychic distress of his characters, their vaudeville-like brutishness and the disjointed dialogue that conveys their despair. The London premiere in 1960 of "The Caretaker," Pinter's sixth work, launched him as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary theater. In it Aston, a mild-mannered handyman, rescues Davies, a homeless tramp, and allows him to stay with him in the derelict house where he lives. The play explores Pinter's recurring themes -- an isolated character, an unexpected "intruder," a power struggle that threatens to turn violent. Words are a negotiating tool, a weapon or a coverup. At times the audience is not certain what to think or whom to believe. "What adds piquancy . . .

is that each character can see through the other's pretensions while still clinging desperately to his own," British critic Michael Billington wrote in his 1996 book "The Life and Work of Harold Pinter." Theater audiences in London gave "The Caretaker" standing ovations. The play ran for a year, and a film version followed with Robert Shaw as Aston, Donald Pleasence as Davies and Alan Bates as Aston's brother Mick. Although "The Caretaker" was a major success, "The Birthday Party," which critics now consider one of his finest, was a flop when it opened in London in 1958. Pinter offered few of the expected elements of a traditional theater piece. He gave scant background about his characters, their motives were unclear, and he allowed no easy answers or consoling resolutions. It was left to the audience to form judgments and moral conclusions.

He later referred to "The Birthday Party" as "the most universally detested play that London had known for a very long time." Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize-winning playwright and poet who dominated British theatre for four decades | The Independent Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize-winning playwright and poet who dominated British theatre for four decades Friday 26 December 2008 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online How to describe such a life as Harold Pinter's, or to ask about his achievement without hearing that ringing baritone demanding (as he once did when asked how he was that day), "What kind of a question is that?" Pinter was an actor and director, a poet and prose writer, the author of 20 screenplays, a cricketer and an impassioned political witness to his times; above all, for over 40 years he dominated the theatre. When The Birthday Party opened in London in 1958, it ran for a weekfollowing catastrophic notices. On the Thursday afternoon the youngplaywright crept towards the dress circle to observe the matinée.

He was alone: when an usher came to see him off since the circle was closed, his admission that he was the authorsoftened her attitude: "Oh, you poor chap . . . in you go." If instead he had sat downstairs in the stalls, he might have noticed Harold Hobson of The Sunday Times cooking up a review that would decisively launch his career the morning after the production closed. It was the beginning of half a century in which, in his own words, he gave his audience not what they wanted, but what he insisted on giving them. Behind him, at this first of many turns in the road, had been a warm but introverted boyhood in Hackney, east London, as the heartily loved only child of Jack Pinter, a ladies' tailor, and his wife Frances. After various bruising evacuations – but also plenty of London in the Blitz – Pinter found a place at Hackney Downs Grammar School, where he met his great English teacher and mentor, Joe Brearley, with whom he would walk from Springfield Park to Bethnal Green shouting speeches from The Duchess of Malfi and The Revenger's Tragedy at the trolley buses, and under whose direction he played Macbeth and Romeo.

Then, to Jack's and Frances's horror, he was twice arrested and fined as a conscientious objector to National Service; expecting the worst, he took his toothbrush to the tribunal. He had tried Rada but found it too class-bound and dropped out, then done a two-year stretch as an actor in Anew McMaster's touring company in Ireland, playing everything from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Wilde to Agatha Christie – the experience left him with a rhapsodic regard for barnstorming classical acting, though he subsequently had little formally to do with it. Then there was a novel, The Dwarfs (which he later dramatised), three years in rep, his first marriage, to the actress Vivien Merchant, and the birth of their son Daniel. And now the fiasco of The Birthday Party. Anybody can flop: the manner of recovery makes the man. For two years afterwards, like its hero Stanley refusing to be told what to do, Pinter determinedly prepared for success: nursing the play back to health by means of a revival and television adaptation, writing three new plays and overseeing the premieres of two written earlier, The Room and The Dumb Waiter.

After the runaway triumph of The Caretaker in 1960 he needed no more time for recovery. Like the death of John F. Kennedy, this play's début records a moment in many lives. Though forewarned a little by Samuel Beckett, audiences were taken aback by a play that featured a description of electric convulsive therapy and yet was riotously funny, in which language drawn directly from the street but entirely original in its crafting was used as a tactical weapon in a three-sided battle for large and small advantage. The Caretaker has played all over the world, in an infinite variety of ways, its three great parts attracting a host of actors and endless celebration and debate. Over the next decade, Pinter moved on to Broadway, to many awards and his appointment as CBE.

Working in tandem with Peter Hall on The Collection in 1962 he began a lifelong partnership as well as his own career as a London director; he became a screenwriter by virtue of films of his own work (The Caretaker, 1964, and The Birthday Party, 1968) and his four adaptations of others' (among them The Servant and Accident, vintage collaborations with Joseph Losey, 1963 and 1967); and he created another theatre milestone, The Homecoming, in 1965. The story of Ruth's triumphant progress through the predatory jungle of male sexual confusion confirmed Pinter's fascination with the final undefeatability of women; the tribalism of the men proved that an upwardly mobile writer had forgotten nothing of his childhood. In 1970 Pinter was immortalised by Stephen Sondheim, who wrote him into a lyric in Company as conclusive evidence of chic, and he was awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. Accepting guiltily, since at that moment he wasn't writing anything and wasn't about to, he wondered poignantly about the identity of "this fellow called Pinter" whom people wanted to shake hands with.

In fact he was pausing, looking for the oxygen that can be as hard to find after success as failure. His new work with Losey, The Go-Between, would win the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1971, but he was seriously reviewing how to go forward in the theatre; he knew that he couldn't travel any further with "this bunch of people who open doors and come in and go out", but it was taking some time to settle the alternative. At 40, his own landscape was changing; his marriage was beginning to disintegrate, and while some of his generation were hesitant, a new generation of more evidently political playwrights – Hare, Edgar, Brenton, Griffiths – was beginning to move into the light. Typically, Pinter negotiated all this by continuing to change on his own terms – his work becoming if anything more internal, preoccupied with time, human solitude and separation. In Old Times (1971) he suggested how the past could be continually reinvented: this fascination with creative memory had already been broached in Landscape and Silence in 1969.

He then spent 12 months, which he described as a kind of homecoming, "swallowed up" in adapting Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, a period of great personal satisfaction but practical disappointment: the screenplay was never filmed, though it was published, and finally adapted for the theatre in 2000. Pinter became a director of the National Theatre in 1973; he adapted The Last Tycoon for Sam Spiegel and Elia Kazan in 1974. His awesome No Man's Land arrived with unexpected suddenness in 1974: as the play went into production the following year, Pinter started his relationship with Antonia Fraser, attracting a particularly unpleasant frenzy of press attention that would slow down his writing. Instead he directed Noël Coward (Blithe Spirit) and Simon Gray (Otherwise Engaged and The Rear Column), and came back with Betrayal in 1978. Antonia and he married in 1980. Now came, for lack of a better word, the politics, which of course had always been there. Pinter's public role was never, as some thought, a coat he suddenly decided to wear.

He had been shocked into political scepticism as a teenager by the anti-Semitism and anti-Communism (under a Labour government) of the immediate post-war years, and he never forgot the way one of the judges at his military tribunal for conscientious objection had falsified his testimony, accusing him of being a man who wouldn't defend his sister in time of war. So his sense of injustice and instinctive anti-authoritarianism were deep in the bone; in the 1970s he had already attacked American involvement in the overthrow of Allende in Chile and defended the Soviet internee Vladimir Bukovsky. However, the Eighties press, still tumid over his love life, responded to this apparent new turn with the special fury aimed at the writer who gets too big for his boots, that greatest of English sins. Pinter's subsequent position on the US economic blockade of Cuba and intervention in Nicaragua, his contempt for US foreign policy and British compliance with it, down to the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, Bill Clinton's attack on Iraq and the allied attacks on Afghanistan after 11 September, were uncompromising; his tireless human-rights campaigning and scrutiny of the meretricious language of politics he might, almost, choose as his epitaph.

In the early 1980s he continued to adapt (The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1981; his own Betrayal, 1983), and to direct (Quartermaine's Terms, 1981; The Common Pursuit, 1984) – but his political work both slowed down his original writing and sharpened its aim. The tremendous triple bill "Other Places" in 1982 was followed by a two-year silence broken by the sound of a bullet – the brief One for the Road, on the subject of state-authorised torture, written in a single enraged breath one night after an encounter at a party. What the press derided in Pinter the public man were often acts of exceptional courage. During a momentous fact-finding visit to Turkey in 1985 with Arthur Miller (they were Vice-Presidents of Pen, and, the more you think about it, natural partners as citizens and writers), Pinter exploded at a journalist during a dinner in the US Embassy and effectively had them barred from the country.

That was the headline, but the week they spent there thrust the torture in detention of hundreds of thousands of that country's "political" prisoners inescapably under English and American noses – and also engendered the first draft of the 20-minute Mountain Language, dealing with the brutal suppression of minority culture. Oddly, when a group of Kurdish actors rehearsed a revival of the play in north London in 1996 the police, accompanied by helicopters and marksmen, arrested them for carrying (prop) weapons and forbade them to communicate in their own language – the very matter of the play. By the time of the 1988 opening of Mountain Language a vengeful press, parked outside Pinter's house as if for some squalid festival, had mocked to death his June 20th Society, a harmless discussion and debating group of liberal-to-left writers and broadcasters: its public damnation is a measure of the intolerance sluicing through the media during the Thatcher years.

Knowing who his enemies were but also his friends, Pinter entered the 1990s with a four-hour radio tribute, Pinter at Sixty, but with the press still on his back and a rare disappointment in his screenwriting career – Remains of the Day, an assignment which for various reasons he didn't finish. His sharp eye on what he used to call "the state of affairs" didn't miss the deportation of Iraqis at the beginning of the Gulf War, and he wrote a savage short poem, "American Football", which blew the euphemisms off the rhetoric that followed Operation Desert Storm, and which the broadsheets refused to publish. Party Time and A New World Order (both 1991) expressed the same anger dramatically. There were major revivals of The Homecoming, The Birthday Party and Betrayal (which the critics finally approved), and Donald Pleasance, the original Davies in The Caretaker, appeared in the part once more. Pinter himself returned to the stage in No Man's Land at the Almeida in 1992: his mother Frances died, and the beautiful Moonlight the following year was in many ways the result.

Pinter was in this full flood of writing, acting, directing and being an eloquent public nuisance when I had the good fortune to be directed by him in Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides. I am only the latest to report his pride in and unfailing kindness to the fellow actors he directed. You felt ushered towards a performance rather than shoved or cajoled. His self-effacement was that of a carpenter working on a perfect chair: he worked with the same economy that perhaps lay behind the speech in The Dwarfs when a nutcracker is criticised as an inefficient instrument for cracking a nut because of the unnecessary friction at the hinge. There was no carry-on, only the gentlest authority, punctuality and discipline, affection and trust. It was a good time to be with him; with great good humour he seemed to be doing everybody's job better than they did. He had Old Times playing at the Wyndhams, Taking Sides at the Criterion, and was personally wowing them in The Hothouse at the Comedy. What seemed to be some extravagant late flowering was really the start of a long summing-up on all fronts.

Continuing down to the present to clean up in every department, Pinter went on to direct Twelve Angry Men (1996) and Simon Gray's Life Support (1997) and underexposed The Late Middle Classes (1999); to play in The Collection, Breaking the Code, Mojo, Mansfield Park and One for the Road; to take part in two Pinter Festivals in Dublin, and to complete Ashes to Ashes (1996) and Celebration (2000). He faced the final obstacles in his road with an appropriate truculence and a sense of business as usual. A week after announcing, in February 2002, that he had cancer of the oesophagus, while his own production of No Man's Land played at the Lyttelton, he premiered a new work at the NT, Press Conference, performing it himself as part of a programme of his sketches. Soon afterwards he released his poem "Cancer Cells".

In June 2002 he was appointed a Companion of Honour (he had rejected a knighthood in 1996), and in August he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival to announce, "I am no less passionately engaged, nevertheless I think I have come out of this experience with a more detached point of view." Thus armed, he continued to attack politicians for their abuse of language, in due course declaring that George W. Bush and Tony Blair were war criminals who should be impeached: "When I hear Bush say [after the events of 11 September 2001] that "on behalf of all freedom-loving people we are going to continue to fight terrorism" and so on, I wonder what "freedom-hating people" look like: I've never met such people myself or can't even conceive of it.

In other words, he is talking rubbish." After being celebrated across radio and television in the "Pinter at the BBC" season in the autumn, he embarked on a campaign against British military involvement in Iraq, speaking at the mass demonstration in London in February 2003, contributing to Faber's instant book 101 Poems Against War (he brought out his own pamphlet, War, in June 2003), and campaigning in the press. "The US and the UK couldn't care less about the Iraqi people. We've been killing them for years," he said. "What is now on the cards is further mass murder. To say we will rescue the Iraqi people from their dictator by killing them an is an insult to the intelligence." In 2005, not long after directing Simon Gray's The Old Masters in the West End, he seemed to be announcing his retirement from the theatre to concentrate on his political work; War won the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry and he also carried off the Franz Kafka Prize.

His 75th birthday in October was celebrated by the broadcast of Voices, a collaboration with the composer James Clarke, in which he drew on plays such as One for the Road, Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes to create a narrative accompanied by Clarke's radiophonic score. A few days later came the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature – news which he seems to have received on the telephone with something closer to a Pinter silence than a Pinter pause: "I was speechless." One news channel announced that he was dead, then changed its mind and confirmed that he had won the Nobel Prize. "So I've risen from the dead." He sensed that his political activities had been "taken into consideration" in the award. No wonder: they have completed an extraordinary axis in his life of polemics, the spit and sawdust of theatre practice and literary culture. In December 2005, everything that Pinter was seemed to have fused in a superb speech of acceptance. "I have often been asked how my plays come about," he said. "I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said.

That is what they did." But he was unusually explicit about his work, and his working method. "The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by his characters. They resist him, they are not easy to live with." He could write obliquely in fiction, he said, but uncompromisingly in politics because there were ambiguities he stood by as a writer but could not as a citizen. And with a great writer's simplicity he dealt with the justifications for the Iraq war with resounding repetitions: "We were assured that was true. It was not true." It sounded like both a manifesto, and, poignantly, a farewell. Some farewell : in January 2006 he won the Europe Theatre Prize; and in October he delivered himself of a great piece of acting as Beckett's Krapp – fortunately recorded for posterity, as was his radio performance the next spring as Max in The Homecoming. Early in 2007 came the Legion d'Honneur; and throughout the year he was with us in spades. In February The Dumb Waiter was in the West End, and a film version of Celebration was seen on television.

In July The Hothouse was at the NT while Betrayal was at the Donmar. The Broadway production of The Homecoming opened at the end of the year, shortly before the same play's triumphant revival at the Almeida. Then earlier this year a double bill of The Collection and The Lover opened in the West End and a 50th anniversary production of The Birthday Party was staged at The Lyric Hammersmith. He had slept next to a sheep on the road with McMaster, but as a man of letters he became part of a tradition that included Joyce and Eliot. He would have liked to have a drink with Proust and Kafka – but, as he said, he never got around to it. Reams have been written about him as a writer, not all of it irrelevant, and he has, of course, earned his own personalised adjective, usually seriously misapplied. His ear for the vernacular was unerring, his comic escalations riot-ous; his sense of personal politics included the "piss-take", that means of mocking others without their being quite sure of it.

He redistributed the weight of language in the theatre; he was able to make a word or a silence travel in a way that was at once poetic and hilarious; he believed that every sentence written should pay for its keep. His originality, the breadth and depth of his gifts, the thoroughness with which he reorganised his audience, bucked his critics and embraced his citizenship, have been fabulous. Now he's having his drink with Proust, or better still with Len Hutton. For an enormous public the silence will be felt by degrees, and for his colleagues the loss is hard to measure. Along the way, Pinter immortalised many people: the soft-hearted usher on The Birthday Party, Anew McMaster; Joe Brearley; even the disgruntled box-office clerk at a theatre who didn't recognise him, and when reminded replied with a verbal quirk – "Why would I know that?" – which delighted him. For a man of such pride, his sense of self-mockery was acute. Add to this exceptional loyalty and generosity, his brilliance as a raconteur and a high degree of personal imitability, and it is easy to see why anecdotes cluster closely around him.

We already miss the Satanic grin, the bullnecked intemperance in the cause of good theatre that would make him try to stop the traffic outside a rehearsal room or kill a buzzing fly, and which once enabled him to halt the sale of Smarties during a performance; his undeflectable kindness to his colleagues; his half-serious fury at half-imagined slights. Harold Pinter was thought to be frightening, and he was certainly a cutter of crap; but really, like Chekhov, an encounter with him made you want to be simpler, more yourself. For all his fabled belligerence, this was a man of enormous warmth, who made you feel that we were, after all, about something. To have known him was a joy and enrichment; to have been of the same profession has been the greatest privilege.

Harold Pinter, actor, playwright and director: born London 10 October 1930; CBE 1966; FRSL 1967; Associate Director, National Theatre 1973-83; CLit 1998; CH 2002; Nobel Prize for Literature 2005; married 1956 Vivien Merchant (died 1982; one son; marriage dissolved 1980), 1980 Lady Antonia Fraser (née Pakenham); died 24 December 2008. More about:

Question: Which Nobel prize-winning British playwright died in December 2008?
Answer: Harold Pinter