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.
Biography from: contemporarywriters.com |
