Pinter changed the face of theater

Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning 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.

Mr. 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.

"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 noted in announcing that Mr. Pinter had been awarded the prize.

Menace and brutality in daily life — between spouses, parents and children and neighbors — run through Mr. Pinter's plays like an electric current. Dialogue can be elliptical and unspecific but often combative.

"Pinter was without question the most influential English playwright of the postwar," New Yorker magazine critic John Lahr told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. "He streamlined the nature of the stage and changed the way we hear language."

Although Mr. 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 approximately 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 based on popular novels, 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.

Mr. 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."

Mr. Pinter was a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1970s and the first Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s. He gave impassioned speeches opposing the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and chastised the British government for supporting the invasion. He also wrote vitriolic antiwar poetry.

Mr. Pinter was born in London on Oct. 10, 1930, the only child of a Jewish tailor. He was a boy at the start of World War II and like many children in London was evacuated to the countryside for nearly a year.

He was back in the city during part of the Blitz, the German bombing campaign of London. The experience made him passionately intolerant of war.

Mr. Pinter graduated from Hackney Downs and went on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948 to study acting on a grant. But he soon left and spent the next decade writing poems and essays and trying to find work in the theater.

In 1950, Poetry London, a leading literary magazine, published several of his poems under the pseudonym "Harold Pinta," and he found work as radio actor with the BBC.

In 1951, he joined a theater troupe in Ireland as an actor, later calling it his "first proper job on the stage." Mr. Pinter returned to London and acted in a series of repertory companies using the stage name David Baron.

In 1962, Mr. Pinter started a long working relationship with Peter Hall — managing director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and one of London's leading names in theater. Hall directed a stage adaptation of "The Collection," a play Mr. Pinter wrote for television.

Three years later the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered Mr. Pinter's "The Homecoming," widely considered to be his masterpiece.

Through the 1970s Mr. Pinter worked steadily on stage and film productions. He directed his own plays and many by authors he admired, particularly his contemporary Simon Gray. Mr. Pinter worked with movie director Joseph Losey on films starting with "The Servant." Mr. Pinter wrote scripts for "Accident" (1967) and "The Go-Between" (1971), which Losey directed.

An affair he had in the 1960s with television personality Joan Bakewell led him to write "Betrayal," staged at the Royal National Theatre in 1978 and made into a film five years later.

In 1975 Mr. Pinter started an affair with Fraser, a well-known biographer and the wife of a member of Parliament. She divorced her husband. Mr. Pinter divorced Vivian Merchant, and soon afterward he and Fraser married.

Mr. Pinter's influence on younger playwrights has been ongoing. He was a mentor to the late Joe Orton as well as David Mamet, whose dialogue recalls some of Mr. Pinter's quick, disjointed patter.

"There wouldn't be a Mamet without a Pinter," critic Lahr said.

Seattle's Intiman Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre and ACT Theatre, among other local companies, have performed Mr. Pinter's work. Next February, Seattle Rep will stage Mr. Pinter's "Betrayal," which examines marriage and infidelity from the perspectives of four interconnected lovers.

Last May, The Community Theatre in West Seattle produced "Other Places," a bill of three Pinter one-acts from the 1980s, and in recent years Pinter's "Ashes to Ashes" and "The Birthday Party" were mounted by theaters here.

Mr. Pinter is survived by Fraser and Daniel Brand, his son from his marriage with Merchant.

Seattle Times theater critic Misha Berson contributed to this report.