Early life and education

Pinter was born on 10 October 1930, in Hackney, east London, to Jewish, lower-middle class, native-English parents of Eastern-European ancestry. His father, Jack Pinter (1902—1997), was a ladies' tailor, and his mother, Frances (née Moskowitz; 1904—1992), was a housewife and cook. Pinter believed an aunt's erroneous view that the family was Sephardic and had fled the Spanish Inquisition; thus, for his early poems, Pinter used the pseudonym Pinta and at other times used variations such as da Pinto. Later research revealed the legend to be apocryphal. Three of Pinter's grandparents came from Poland and the fourth from Odessa, so the family was Ashkenazic.For some accounts of the significance of Pinter's Jewish background, see Billington, Harold Pinter, pp. 2, 40—41, 53—54, 79—81, 163—64, 177, 286, 390, 429; Woolf ; and as quoted in Merritt, "Talking about Pinter" pp. 144—45; and H. Jacobson.

He was evacuated from the family home in London..."a solid, red-brick, three-storey villa just off the noisy, bustling, traffic-ridden thoroughfare of the Lower Clapton Road" to Cornwall and Reading in 1940 and 1941. The "life-and-death intensity of daily experience" before and during the Blitz left Pinter with profound memories "of loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss: themes that are in all his works".

Although he was an only child, Pinter discovered his social potential as a student at Hackney Downs School, a London grammar school, between 1944 and 1948. "Partly through the school and partly through the social life of Hackney Boys' Club ... he formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male friendship. The friends he made in those days...most particularly Henry Woolf, Michael (Mick) Goldstein and Morris (Moishe) Wernick...have always been a vital part of the emotional texture of his life". A major influence on Pinter was his inspirational English teacher Joseph Brearley, who directed him in school plays and with whom he took long walks, talking about literature. According to Pinter's biographer Michael Billington, under Brearley's instruction, "Pinter shone at English, wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting." He played Romeo and Macbeth, in 1947 and 1948, in productions directed by Brearley.

At the age of 12, Pinter began writing poetry, and in Spring 1947, his poetry was first published in the Hackney Downs School Magazine. In 1950, his poetry was first published outside the school magazine in Poetry London, some of it under the pseudonym "Harold Pinta".

Sport and friendship

Pinter enjoyed running and broke the Hackney Downs School sprinting record.He was an avid cricket enthusiast, taking his bat with him when evacuated during the Blitz. In 1971 he told Mel Gussow: "one of my main obsessions in life is the game of cricket...I play and watch and read about it all the time". Being Chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club and a lifetime support[er] of Yorkshire Cricket Club, Pinter devoted an entire section of his official website to the sport ("Gaieties Cricket Club"). One wall of his study was dominated by a portrait of himself as a young man playing cricket. "The painted Mr. Pinter, poised to swing his bat, has a wicked glint in his eye; testosterone all but flies off the canvas". Pinter approved of the "urban and exacting idea of cricket as a bold theatre of aggression". After his death, several of his school contemporaries recalled his achievements in sports, especially cricket and running. The BBC Radio 4 memorial tribute included an essay on Pinter and cricket.

Other interests that Pinter mentioned to interviewers are family, love and sex, drinking, writing, and reading. According to Billington, "If the notion of male loyalty, competitive rivalry and fear of betrayal forms a constant thread in Pinter's work from The Dwarfs onwards, its origins can be found in his teenage Hackney years. Pinter adores women, enjoys flirting with them, worships their resilience and strength. But, in his early work especially, they are often seen as disruptive influences on some pure, Platonic ideal of male friendship: one of the most crucial of all Pinter's lost Edens".

Early theatrical training and stage experience

Beginning in late 1948, Pinter attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two terms, but hating the school, missed most of his classes, feigned a nervous breakdown, and dropped out in 1949. In 1948 he was also "called up for National Service", registered as a conscientious objector, was brought to trial twice, and was ultimately fined by the magistrate for refusing to serve. He had a small part in the Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949 to 1950. From January to July 1951, he attended the Central School of Speech and Drama.

From 1951 to 1952, he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company, playing over a dozen roles. In 1952 he began acting in regional English repertory productions; from 1953 to 1954, he worked for the Donald Wolfit Company, King's Theatre, Hammersmith, performing eight roles. From 1954 until 1959, Pinter acted under the stage name David Baron. In all, Pinter played nearly 25 roles under that name. To supplement his income from acting, Pinter worked as a waiter, a postman, a bouncer and snow-clearer, meanwhile "harbouring ambitions as a poet and writer". In October 1989, Pinter recalled: "I was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years. My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into". During that period, he also performed occasional roles in his own and others' works (for radio, TV, and film), as he did later as well.

Marriage and family life

From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant, an actress whom he met on tour, probably best known for her performance in the 1966 film Alfie. Their son, Daniel, was born in 1958. Through the early 1970s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, most notably The Homecoming on stage (1965) and screen (1973), but the marriage was turbulent. For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with BBC-TV presenter and journalist Joan Bakewell, which inspired his 1978 play Betrayal. Initially the play was thought to be a response to his 1975 affair with historian Antonia Fraser, the wife of Hugh Fraser, and Pinter's "marital crack-up". Billington showed, however, that the play was inspired by Pinter's earlier affair with Bakewell.

Though the Pinters had both met Antonia Fraser in 1969, when they worked together on a National Gallery programme about Mary, Queen of Scots, it was not until January 1975 that Pinter became romantically involved with her. The affair lasted six weeks. After Merchant returned from acting in Death of a Salesman at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, where she had become ill and had to return home, Pinter felt he could not tell her about "his state of emotional turmoil, though he did confide in Peggy Ashcroft, as well as to Peter Hall and [artist] Guy Vaesen". Pinter confessed the affair to his wife in late March 1975. After that, "Life in Hanover Terrace gradually became impossible", and Pinter moved out of their house on 28 April 1975, five days after Hall's première of No Man's Land. First, Pinter stayed in an apartment owned by Sam Spiegel, and next he moved in with Donald Pleasence and his family, where he was joined by his son Daniel, as Pinter found that "Vivien couldn't cope with bringing up Daniel alone". Merchant made the break-up public, granting interviews to the papers, and on 27 July 1975, she filed for divorce, resulting in further interest in the press. "For all concerned, it was a traumatic summer: one of separation, confrontation, pursuit and flight. What kept the story alive were Vivien's indiscretions.... Everyone else, to their credit, maintained a stoical silence".

After spending two years living in borrowed and rented quarters, in August 1977, Pinter and Antonia Fraser moved into the Frasers' family home in Holland Park, where he wrote Betrayal. After the Frasers' divorce had become final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980, Pinter married Fraser in late October 1980. Because of a two-week delay in Merchant's signing the divorce papers, however, the reception had to precede the actual ceremony, originally scheduled to occur on his 50th birthday. Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in the first week of October 1982, at the age of 53. Pinter "did everything possible to support" her until her death and regretted that he ultimately became estranged from their son, Daniel, after their separation, Pinter's remarriage, and Merchant's death.

A reclusive gifted musician and writer, Daniel stopped using the surname Pinter in the summer of 1975, when he was living with Pinter and Antonia Fraser, adopting instead Brand, his maternal grandmother's maiden name. Pinter later claimed this was "largely pragmatic move on Daniel's part designed to keep the press... at bay". Fraser recalled that Daniel "was very nice to me at a time when it would have been only too easy for him to have turned on me ... simply because he had been the sole focus of his father's love and now manifestly wasn't." Still unreconciled at the time of his father's death, Daniel Brand did not attend Pinter's funeral.

Billington observes that "The break-up with Vivien and the new life with Antonia was to have a profound effect on Pinter's personality and his work", while Fraser denies that she had any direct input into his plays. She stated that "other people [such as Peggy Ashcroft, among others] had a shaping influence on his politics" and attributed changes in his writing and political views to a change from "an unhappy, complicated personal life ... to a happy, uncomplicated personal life," so that "a side of Harold which had always been there was somehow released. I think you can see that in his work after No Man's Land [1975], which was a very bleak play".

Pinter was content in his second marriage and enjoyed family life with his six adult stepchildren and 17 step-grandchildren. Even after battling cancer for several years, he considered himself "a very lucky man in every respect".Quoted in Wark; see Billington, "They said". The New York Times noted in a 2007 interview that Pinter's "latest work, a slim pamphlet called Six Poems for A., comprises poems written over 32 years, with 'A' being Lady Antonia. The first of the poems was written in Paris, where she and Pinter traveled soon after they met. More than three decades later, the two were rarely apart, and Mr. Pinter turned soft, even cozy, when he talked about his wife". In the interview, Pinter "acknowledged that his plays...full of infidelity, cruelty, inhumanity, the lot...seem at odds with his domestic contentment. "How can you write a happy play?" he said. "Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life". After his death, Fraser told The Guardian: "He was a great, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten".

Civic activities and political activism

In 1948—49, when he was 18, Pinter opposed the politics of the Cold War, leading to his decision to become a conscientious objector and to refuse to comply with National Service in the British military. But he was not a pacifist. He told interviewers that, if he had been old enough at the time, he would have fought against the Nazis in World War II. He seemed to express ambivalence about politicians in his 1966 Paris Review interview conducted by Lawrence M. Bensky. Yet, he had actually been an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom and also had supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959—1994), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaigns.Mbeki; Reddy. In "A Play and Its Politics", a 1985 interview, Pinter described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of the politics of power and the dynamics of oppression.

In his last 25 years, Pinter increasingly focused his essays, interviews and public appearances directly on political issues. He was an officer in International PEN, travelling with American playwright Arthur Miller to Turkey in 1985 on a mission co-sponsored with a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language. He was also an active member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organisation that "campaigns in the U.K. against the U.S. blockade of Cuba". In 2001, Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milo?evi? (ICDSM), which appealed for a fair trial for and the freedom of Slobodan Milo?evi?, signing a related "Artists' Appeal for Milo?evi?" in 2004.

He strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the United States' 2001 War in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Among his provocative political statements, Pinter called Prime Minister Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" and compared the administration of President George W. Bush to Nazi Germany. He stated that the U.S. "was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's 'mass-murdering' prime minister sat back and watched". He was very active in the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition and frequently criticising American aggression: "the invasion of Iraq [was a] bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law."

The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Pinter and his sharp political statements have elicited strong criticism and even, at times, provoked ridicule and personal attacks.See, e.g., Hari, Hitchens, and Pryce-Jones. For example, the historian Geoffrey Alderman, author of the official history of Hackney Downs School, wrote that "Whatever his merit as a writer, actor and director, on an ethical plane Harold Pinter seems to me to have been intensely flawed, and his moral compass deeply fractured." David Edgar, writing in The Guardian, defended Pinter against what he termed Pinter's "being berated by the belligerati" like Johann Hari, who felt that he did not "deserve" to win the Nobel Prize. Later he continued to campaign against the Iraq War and on behalf of other political causes that he supported. For example, he signed the mission statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians in 2005 and its full-page advertisement, "What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain", published in The Times on 6 July 2006, and was a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature.

As actor

Pinter's acting career spanned over 50 years and, although he often played villains, included a wide range of roles on stage and in radio, film, and television. In addition to roles in radio and television adaptations of his own plays and dramatic sketches, early in his screenwriting career he made several cameo appearances in films based on his own screenplays; for example, as a society man in The Servant (1963) and as Mr. Bell in Accident (1967), both directed by Joseph Losey; and as a bookshop customer in his later film Turtle Diary (1985), starring Michael Gambon, Glenda Jackson, and Ben Kingsley.

Pinter's notable film and television roles included the corrupt lawyer Saul Abrahams, opposite Peter O'Toole, in BBC TV's Rogue Male (1976), a remake of the 1941 film noir Man Hunt, released on DVD in 2002; and a drunk Irish journalist in Langrishe, Go Down (starring Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons) distributed on BBC Two in 1978 and released in movie theatres in 2002. Pinter's later film roles included the criminal Sam Ross in Mojo (1997), written and directed by Jez Butterworth, based on Butterworth's play of the same name; Sir Thomas Bertram (his most substantial feature-film role) in Mansfield Park (1998), a character that Pinter described as "a very civilised man ... a man of great sensibility but in fact, he's upholding and sustaining a totally brutal system [the slave trade] from which he derives his money"; and Uncle Benny, opposite Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush, in The Tailor of Panama (2001). In television films, he played Mr. Bearing, the father of ovarian cancer patient Vivian Bearing, played by Emma Thompson (and directed by Mike Nichols), in the HBO film of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit (2001); and the Director opposite John Gielgud (Gielgud's last role) and Rebecca Pidgeon in Catastrophe, by Samuel Beckett, directed by David Mamet as part of Beckett On Film (2001).

As director

Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre (NT) in 1973. He directed almost 50 productions of his own and others' plays for stage, film, and television, including 10 productions of works by Simon Gray: the stage and/or film premières of Butley (stage, 1971; film, 1974), Otherwise Engaged (1975), The Rear Column (stage, 1978; TV, 1980), Close of Play (NT, 1979), Quartermaine's Terms (1981), Life Support (1997), The Late Middle Classes (1999), and The Old Masters (2004). Several of those productions starred Alan Bates (1934—2003), who originated the stage and screen roles of not only Butley but also Mick in Pinter's first major commercial success, The Caretaker (stage, 1960; film, 1964); and in Pinter's double-bill produced at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1984, he played Nicolas in One for the Road and the cab driver in Victoria Station. Among over 35 plays that Pinter directed were Next of Kin (1974), by John Hopkins; Blithe Spirit (1976), by Noël Coward; Circe and Bravo (1986), by Donald Freed; Taking Sides (1995), by Ronald Harwood; and Twelve Angry Men (1996), by Reginald Rose.

As playwright

Pinter is the author of 29 plays and 15 dramatic sketches and the co-author of two works for stage and radio. Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays received many awards in the U.K. and elsewhere throughout the world. His style has entered the English language as an adjective, "Pinteresque", although Pinter himself disliked the term and found it meaningless.

"Comedies of menace" (1957—1968)

The Room and The Birthday Party (1957)

Pinter's first play, The Room, written and first performed in 1957, was a student production at the University of Bristol, directed by his good friend, actor Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd (which he reprised in 2001 and 2007). After Pinter mentioned that he had an idea for a play, Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it to fulfill a requirement for his postgraduate work. Pinter wrote it in three days. The production was "a staggeringly confident debut which attracted the attention of a young producer, Michael Codron, who decided to present Pinter's next play, The Birthday Party, at the Lyric Hammersmith, in 1958".

Written in 1957 and produced in 1958, Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, one of his best-known works, was initially both a commercial and critical disaster, despite a rave review in The Sunday Times by its influential drama critic Harold Hobson, which appeared only after the production had closed and could not be reprieved. Critical accounts often quote Hobson's prophetic words: Hobson was generally credited by Pinter himself and other critics as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career;Billington, Harold Pinter, p. 85; Gussow [Sept. 1993 interview] (141).

In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, a play by David Campton, critic Irving Wardle called Pinter's early plays "comedy of menace"...a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work.Merritt, Pinter in Play, pp. 5, 9, 225—26, and 310 (Merritt states that "Comedy of menace" is a verbal pun on "Comedy of manners", with menace being pronounced with a Judeo-English accent as manners.) Such plays begin with an apparently innocent situation that becomes both threatening and "absurd" as Pinter's characters behave in ways often perceived as inexplicable by his audiences and one another. Pinter acknowledges the influence of Samuel Beckett, particularly on his early work; they became friends, sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments.

The Hothouse (1958/1980), The Dumb Waiter (1959), The Caretaker (1959), and other early plays

Pinter wrote The Hothouse in 1958, which he shelved for over 20 years (See "Overtly political sketches" below). He next wrote The Dumb Waiter (1959), which premiered in Germany and was then produced in a double bill with The Room at the Hampstead Theatre Club, in London, in 1960. It was not produced very often thereafter until the 1980s, and it has been revived more frequently since 2000, including the West End Trafalgar Studios production in 2007. The first production of The Caretaker, at the Arts Theatre Club, in London, in 1960, established Pinter's theatrical reputation.Jones Pinter next wrote the longer political satire Party Time (1991), which premièred at the Almeida Theatre in London, in a double-bill with Mountain Language. After Pinter adapted it as a television screenplay in 1992, he directed it for broadcast.

Intertwining political and personal concerns, his next full-length plays, Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996) are set in domestic households and focus on dying and death; Devlin and Rebecca in Ashes to Ashes allude to unspecified "atrocities", in their conversations, that relate to the Holocaust. After experiencing the deaths of first his mother (1992) and then his father (1997), again merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems "Death" (1997) and "The Disappeared" (1998).

Pinter's last stage play, Celebration (2000), is a social satire, set in an opulent restaurant, which lampoons The Ivy, a gathering place for the theatre crowd near Covent Garden in London's West End theatre district, and its patrons who "have just come from performances of either the ballet or the opera. Not that they can remember a darn thing about what they saw, including the titles. [These] gilded, foul-mouthed souls are just as myopic when it comes to their own table mates (and for that matter, their food), with conversations that usually connect only on the surface, if there." The play may appear superficially to have fewer overtly political resonances than some of the plays from the 1980s and 1990s. Its central male characters, however, brothers named Lambert and Matt, are members of the elite (like the men "in charge" in Party Time), who describe themselves as "peaceful strategy consultants [because] we don't carry guns". At the next table, Russell, a banker, describes himself as a "totally disordered personality ... a psychopath", while Lambert "vows to be reincarnated as '[a] more civilised, [a] gentler person, [a] nicer person'". Extreme viciousness underlies these characters' smoother exteriors. Celebration evokes familiar Pinteresque political contexts: "The ritzy loudmouths in 'Celebration' ... and the quieter working-class mumblers of 'The Room' ... have everything in common beneath the surface". "Money remains in the service of entrenched power, and the brothers in the play are 'strategy consultants' whose jobs involve force and violence.... It is tempting but inaccurate to equate the comic power inversions of the social behavior in Celebration with lasting change in larger political structures", according to Grimes, who finds the play indicative of Pinter's pessimism about the possibility of changing the status quo.

As the Waiter's often comically unbelievable reminiscences about his grandfather demonstrate in Celebration, Pinter's final stage plays also extend some expressionistic aspects of his earlier "memory plays", while harkening back to his "comedies of menace", as illustrated in the characters and in the Waiter's final speech: "My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I'm still in the middle of it. I can't find the door to get out. My grandfather got out of it. He got right out of it. He left it behind him and he didn't look back. He got that absolutely right. And I'd like to make one further interjection. He stands still. Slow fade."

Around the same time, Remembrance of Things Past, Pinter's adaptation of his unpublished screenplay, and the revival of The Caretaker directed by Patrick Marber and starring Michael Gambon, Rupert Graves, and Douglas Hodge, played simultaneously in London's West End (both 2000—2001).

Like Celebration, Pinter's next-to-last sketch, Press Conference (2002), "invokes both torture and the fragile, circumscribed existence of dissent". For its première in the National Theatre's two-part production of Sketches, despite undergoing chemotherapy at the time, Pinter played the ruthless Minister willing to murder little children for the benefit of "The State".

As screenwriter

Pinter was the author of 27 screenplays and film scripts for cinema and television, many of which were filmed, or adapted as stage plays. His fame as a screenwriter began with his three screenplays written for films directed by Joseph Losey, leading to their close friendship: The Servant (1963), based on the novel by Robin Maugham and starring Dirk Bogarde and James Fox; Accident (1967), adapted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley and starring Bogarde, Pinter's first wife Vivien Merchant, Jacqueline Sassard, Delphine Seyrig, and Michael York; and The Go-Between (1970), based on the novel by L. P. Hartley and starring Alan Bates and Julie Christie. Films based on Pinter's adaptations of his own stage plays are The Caretaker (1963), directed by Clive Donner; The Birthday Party (1968), staged by William Friedkin; The Homecoming (1973), directed by Peter Hall; and Betrayal (1983), with David Hugh Jones directing.

Pinter also wrote many screenplays based on novels, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964), adapted from the novel by Penelope Mortimer, directed by Jack Clayton and starring Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, James Mason, and Maggie Smith, among others; The Quiller Memorandum (1966), from the 1965 spy novel The Berlin Memorandum, by Elleston Trevor, directed by Michael Anderson, starring George Segal and featuring Senta Berger, Alec Guinness, and Max von Sydow; The Last Tycoon (1976), from the unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, staged by Elia Kazan, and starring Tony Curtis, Robert De Niro, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, and Theresa Russell; The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), from the novel by John Fowles, directed by Karel Reisz, and starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep; Turtle Diary (1985), from the novel by Russell Hoban, starring Michael Gambon, Glenda Jackson, and Ben Kingsley; The Heat of the Day (1988), a television film, from the 1949 novel by Elizabeth Bowen; The Comfort of Strangers (1990), from the novel by Ian McEwan, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Rupert Everett, Helen Mirren, Natasha Richardson, and Christopher Walken; and The Trial (1993), from the novel by Franz Kafka, directed by David Hugh Jones and starring Kyle MacLachlan, with cameo appearances by Anthony Hopkins, Alfred Molina and others.

His commissioned screenplay adaptations from others' works for the films The Handmaid's Tale (1990), The Remains of the Day (1990), and Lolita, remain unpublished and in the case of the latter two films, uncredited, though several scenes from or aspects of his scripts were also used in these finished films. His screenplays The Proust Screenplay (1972), Victory (1982), and The Dreaming Child (1997) and his unpublished screenplay The Tragedy of King Lear (2000) have not been filmed. A section of Pinter's Proust Screenplay was, however, released as the 1984 film Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann), directed by Volker Schlöndorff and starring Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti, and it was also adapted by Michael Bakewell as a 2-hour radio drama broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1995. Later Pinter and director Di Trevis collaborated to adapted it for the stage, as Remembrance of Things Past, opening at the National Theatre in 2000.

Pinter's screenwriting career culminated in his last filmed screenplay adaptation of the 1970 Tony Award-winning play Sleuth, by Anthony Shaffer, which was commissioned by Jude Law, one of the film's producers. It is the basis for the 2007 film Sleuth, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Law as Milo Tindle (played by Caine in the 1972 film of Sleuth) and Michael Caine as Andrew Wyke (played by Laurence Olivier in the earlier film). Pinter's screenplays for both The French Lieutenant's Woman and Betrayal were nominated for Academy Awards in 1981 and 1983, respectively.

2001—2008

From 16 to 31 July 2001, a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work, curated by Michael Colgan, artistic director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, was held as part of the annual Lincoln Center Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City. Pinter participated both as an actor, as Nicolas in One for the Road, and as a director of a double bill pairing his last play, Celebration, with his first play, The Room.Reports and reviews of the 2001 Lincoln Center Pinter Festival productions and symposia in The Pinter Review, The Harold Pinter Society (2002); Merritt, "Talking about Pinter". As part of a two-week "Harold Pinter Homage" at the World Leaders Festival of Creative Genius, held from 24 September to 30 October 2001, at Harbourfront Centre, in Toronto, Canada, Pinter presented a dramatic reading of Celebration (2000) and also participated in a public interview as part of the International Festival of Authors.; and a troupe of students from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, directed by Ian Rickson.

On 16 June 2009, Antonia Fraser officially opened the Harold Pinter Room & Studio at the Hackney Empire, renaming the Hackney Empire Hospitality Suite. Most of an issue of the Arts Tri-Quarterly Areté was devoted to pieces remembering Pinter, beginning with Pinter's 1987 unpublished love poem dedicated "To Antonia" and his poem "Paris", written in 1975, the year that he and Fraser began living together. These poems are followed by brief memoirs by some of Pinter's associates and friends, including Patrick Marber, Nina Raine, Tom Stoppard, Peter Nichols, Susanna Gross, Richard Eyre, and David Hare.

A memorial cricket match at Lord's Cricket Ground between the Gaieties Cricket Club and the Lord's Taverners, followed by performances of Pinter's poems and excerpts from his plays, took place on 27 September 2009.

An Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America (1970), Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002, having declined a knighthood in 1996. In 1995 and 1996 he accepted the David Cohen Prize, in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement, and the Laurence Olivier Special Award for lifetime achievement in the theatre, respectively. In 1997, he became a BAFTA Fellow. He received the World Leaders Award for "Creative Genius" as the subject of a week-long "Homage" in Toronto, in October 2001. In 2004, he received the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry for his "lifelong contribution to literature, 'and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled War, published in 2003'". In March 2006, he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in recognition of lifetime achievements pertaining to drama and theatre. In conjunction with that award, critic Michael Billington coordinated an international conference on Pinter: Passion, Poetry, Politics, including scholars and critics from Europe and the Americas, held in Turin, Italy, from 10 to 14 March 2006.