Harold Pinter

In 1956, Harold Pinter married English actress Viven Merchant. He was still a struggling artist and Viven offered him the necessary support and bore him his only child, a son named Daniel. The marriage began to disintegrate from the middle of 1960s and finally, the couple divorced in 1980.

From 1975, Pinter developed a close relation with historian Antonia Fraser. They got married in 1980 after Pinter obtained his divorce. The union, which lasted until his death in 2008, did not produce any more children. However, he had six stepchildren from Fraser’s first marriage.

In December 2001, Harold Pinter was diagnosed with oesophagal cancer and underwent chemotherapy several times. In spite of such deadly disease he led an active life.

Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930 in Hackney, East London. Although it was initially believed that they were Sephardi Jews having their roots in Spain later researches have found that the family was actually Ashkenazi Jews with Eastern European ancestry.

Harold was the only child of his parents Hyman and Frances Printers, While Hyman, popularly known as Jack, was a ladies’ tailor Frances was a homemaker. Their home was located off Lower Clapton Road. Harold spent a lot of time in the backyard of this house talking to imaginary friends.

When in 1940, the German forces started bombing London, nine year old Harold was evacuated first to Cornwall and then to Reading. The incident left a lasting mark on his young mind. The bewilderment, loneliness and separation that he experienced at that time were reflected repeatedly in his writings later on.

He joined Hackney Downs School in 1944 and studied there till 1948. At Hackney, he was much influenced by his English teacher Joseph Brearley and studied the works of eminent writers like Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Eliot, Lawrence, Woolf and Hemingway.

Under Brearley’s guidance, he not only excelled in English, but also started writing for school magazine and took part in school drama. At the same time, he also developed a lifelong passion for cricket and enjoyed running. He broke his school’s record in sprinting.

Harold Pinter left RADA in 1949 and enrolled at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. In 1951, he started working for Anew McMaster's Shakespearean Irish touring company and played over a dozen roles over a period of two years.

Later in 1953, he joined Donald Wolfit's company in Hammersmith and worked with them until 1954. Next he took up the stage name of David Baron and enacted around 20 roles under this name. To supplement his income he had to take up small jobs like dishwashing and snow shovelling.

At the same time, he continued writing poems as well as prose. This was also the time when he started writing an autobiographical novel on the life of his old neighbourhood Hackney. The book was published as ‘The Dwarf’ in 1990.

He got his first break as a playwright in 1957, when his old friend Henry Woolf, asked him to write a play for the recently established drama department of the University of Bristol. He wrote ‘The Room’, which depicted a recluse resisting the pressures of the outside world.

The Room’ attracted the attention of theatre producer, Michael Cordon. In 1958, he staged Pinter’s next play, ’Birthday Party’. Although the play was warmly received in pre-London tour, it drew very bad review in London and had to be taken off the stage in eight days. Ironically, the same play was considered a classic few years later.

Pinter’s major works can be divided into three categories. His early plays were rooted in ‘absurdism’. ‘The Birthday Party’ (1958), ‘The Dumb Waiter’ (1959) and ‘The Caretaker’ (1960) fall in the category. These plays have been termed as ‘Comedy of Menace’.

From 1968 to 1982, Pinter began to explore the complex characteristics of human memory. Critics have termed these works as ‘Memory Plays’. Some of the major works of this category are: ‘Landscape’ (1968), ‘Silence’ (1969), ‘Night’ (1969), ‘Old Times’ (1971), ‘No Man's Land’ (1975), ‘The Proust Screenplay’ (1977), ‘Betrayal’ (1978), ‘Family Voices’ (1981), ‘Victoria Station’ (1982), and ‘A Kind of Alaska’ (1982).

Next from the beginning of the 1980s till 2000s, Pinter’s plays became overtly political. ‘One for the Road’ (1984) is first major work of these category. The play is said to be his statement about human rights abuses under totalitarian rule.