Pinter was born in Hackney in London to working class Jewish parents. He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School and, briefly, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). He published poetry as a young man.
Pinter began working in the theatre as an actor, under the stage name David Baron. His first play, The Room, was first performed by Bristol University students in 1957.
His second play (which is today one of his best-known), The Birthday Party (1958), was initially a flop, despite a positive review in the Sunday Times by leading theatre critic Harold Hobson. But after the success of The Caretaker in 1960, which established him, The Birthday Party was revived, and this time was well received.
These plays, and other early works such as The Homecoming (1964), have sometimes been labelled as displaying the "comedy of menace". They often take an apparently innocent situation, and reveal it as a threatening and absurd one because of characters acting in ways which may seem inexplicable both to the audience and, at times, to other characters. Pinter's work was marked by the influence of Samuel Beckett from the earliest works onwards, and the two men became long-standing friends.
Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre in 1973. His later plays tend to be shorter, often appearing as allegories of oppression.
He has been nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay twice ("The French Lieutenant's Woman" -1981 and "Betrayal" -1983.)
In January 2005 he announced that he was retiring from writing plays to dedicate himself to political campaigning.
Pinter has been a champion of freedom of expression for many years through his association with International PEN. In 1985, he joined the American playwright Arthur Miller on an International PEN-Helsinki Watch Committee mission to Turkey to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met many victims of political oppression. At an American embassy function honouring Miller, instead of exchanging pleasantries, Pinter spoke of people having an electric current applied to their genitals—which got him thrown out. (Miller, in support, left the embassy with him.) Pinter's experience of oppression in Turkey and the suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language.
Pinter opposed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He famously called President of the United States, George W. Bush a mass murderer and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair a 'deluded idiot'. He frequently writes political letters to British newspapers. He has likened the Bush administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying the U.S. was charging towards world domination while the American public and the United Kingdom's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched. [1]
In his Noble Prize Lecture Art, Truth & Politics December 7, 2005,[2] he asserts:
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
Pinter is also an active delegate of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that defends Cuba, is supportive of the government of Fidel Castro, and campaigns against the U.S. embargo on the country. He is a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević, an organization that appeals for the freedom of Slobodan Milošević.
Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 (having previously declined a knighthood in 1996).
On October 13, 2005 the Swedish Academy announced Pinter was the recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, stating that, "in his plays [he] uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms". Pinter, ailing from throat cancer, could not attend the Nobel Prize awards ceremony in Sweden, and chose instead to deliver his laureate lecture via satellite link on December 7, 2005. Speaking with obvious difficulty, and seated in a wheelchair, he attacked the United States and Great Britain over the Iraq war, and demanded war crimes prosecution of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Video excerpts from the lecture are available via this page from the British BBC. See also external links.
Pinter is the chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club. He is also an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
On October 13, 2005 (the day his Nobel Prize was announced) Pinter was erroneously reported dead on a cable television channel. (This may have been because he has been suffering from cancer for several years, and also injured his head in a fall shortly before the report.)
Couldn't we accidently release one of those hair trigger nukes in Harold's direction? You have to admit though, he is hillarious; hr sums up almost every nutball idea that's come down the pike.
Their deaths don't exist is the only snippet of truth in this article. This guy seems to be teetering on the edge of suicide with all his self hate.
This I believe.
"If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man."
Obviously lacking in this "vision" is a view of some 20 million living under the thumb of Saddam and Sons, and all that entailed.
A rather selective indignation, from a less than useful idiot.
At least half the people in the Democratic Party would agree with every bit of this speech, except for the negative comments about the Soviet Union and the Soviet satellite regimes.
We were once told that the British were our masters. We were assured that this was true. It was not true.
Hey Harold - ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...........
Screw harold pinter and the swedish communists who gave him a Nobel Prize. The science Nobels are awarded by Norwegian scientists, but the worthless peace prize is "awarded" by left-wing swedish pols.