Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter (1930 to 2008) was an English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who became one of the most influential dramatists of modern British theatre during a writing career of more than fifty years. His plays include The Birthday Party, The Homecoming and Betrayal, and he adapted each of these for the screen. He also wrote screenplays from other writers' work, among them The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Trial and Sleuth, and he directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' work. In 2005 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Hackney in east London, he trained briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and then worked in repertory theatre before The Room reached the stage in 1957. For this atlas he matters as a writer whose work moved between the theatre, radio, television and cinema, and whose screenplays shaped several well known British films.