Harold Pinter's first play was produced in 1957. His last dramatic sketch was staged in 2006. He wrote 29 plays, plus numerous dramatic sketches, radio and TV plays and screenplays for feature films, including The French Lieutenant's Woman and Sleuth. His most famous plays include The Homecoming, Betrayal (made into a feature film starring Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley, from Pinter's screenplay), No Man's Land and Old Times. He also wrote fiction, poetry and essays. Pinter was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Harold Pinter was born into a lower middle class family in East London, of Eastern European Jewish ancestry. In his local grammar school, Pinter enjoyed sports (cricket was a lifetime passion), reading literature and writing poetry. But instead of university he attended several drama schools (including a brief stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), and pursued a career in acting. It was while acting in a repertory company touring England that Pinter began writing plays.

As a playwright Pinter emerged in the late 1950s with The Room, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter, quickly distinguishing himself from the "kitchen sink" school of working class playwrights then dominating British drama. Along with Edward Albee in America, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco in France, Pinter transformed world drama with a mixture of intensity and absurdity in the late 50s and early 1960s.

"No other British playwright since Noël Coward has so dominated and defined the theatrical landscape of his time," wrote critic John Lahr in 2007. While the hard-edged aspect of his plays may be echoed in the work of David Mamet, for instance, the funnier dialogue--the circular elaborations and oddly formal yet empty locutions, the straight-faced absurd in a working class accent--can later be found in the sketches of Peter Cook and Beyond the Fringe, John Cleese and Monty Python, and even some specific echoes in the Beatles films.

Pinter continued acting on stage and in films from time to time (his last stage role was in Samuel Beckett's one-person play, Krapp's Last Tape in 2006.) He also worked often as a stage, TV and film director. He directed many of Simon Gray's first productions, including Butley. For stage, he directed plays from Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit to Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men. Among Pinter's playwriting friends were Beckett and Tom Stoppard.

Pinter's first and eventually unhappy marriage to actress Vivien Merchant and his affairs are often cited as background for some of his unhappy plays. His marriage to writer Antonia Fraser in 1980 however proved a long and happy one. Though avowedly nonpolitical in his early career, Pinter had refused military service as a conscientious objector. Later he became more overtly political, in a few plays but mostly in nonfiction and public speaking. He devoted much of his Nobel Prize speech to analyzing the lies embedded in the Iraq war and U.S. policy generally.

Pinter died of cancer on Christmas Eve of 2008.

Links
Harold Pinter at Wikipedia
Harold Pinter.org
Pinter's Nobel Prize Lecture
Pinter's 1966 Paris Review Interview
Review of Pinter's Career
Demolition Man: Harold Pinter and The Homecoming