Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter, who lived from October 10, 1930, to December 24, 2008, was an English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who became one of the most influential modern British dramatists. Over more than five decades he wrote twenty-nine plays and fifteen dramatic sketches, including The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), and also adapted screenplays including The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981). His early plays were characterized as comedies of menace, while his later work became known for memory plays exploring the ambiguities of recollection; in 2005 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the adjective Pinteresque entered the language to describe his distinctive style.