這是The Times今天對Pinter的介紹，不少Pinter自己的話。
Pinter, outspoken master of the pregnant pause
By Philippe Naughton
For a man best known for his pregnant pauses, Harold Pinter has never
been afraid to speak his mind.
Britain's greatest playwright of the past half-century, who was today
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, has traversed the worlds of
cinema and stage, producing 29 plays and working as well as an actor,
poet and director.
But he is almost as well known for his uncompromising political beliefs.
He turned down an offer of a knighthood from the fomer Prime Minister,
John Major, and has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, calling
Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" and President Bush a "mass murderer".
In 1985 he travelled to Turkey with the American playwright Arthur Miller
but was thrown out of a US embassy function honouring his colleague when
he spoke of people having an electric current applied to their genitals.
Pinter's experience of oppression in Turkey and the suppression of the
Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language.
Pinter's first play, The Room, contained many of the elements that have
characterised his later works - namely a commonplace situation gradually
invested with menace and mystery through the deliberate omission of an
explanation or motivation for the action. It was, although the word did
not yet exist, genuinely Pinteresque.
He is probably best known for his absurdist masterpieces The Caretaker,
The Homecoming and Betrayal. He also co-wrote the screenplays for
Accident and The Servant, two classics of British cinema.
Pinter was born in Hackney in 1930, the only son of immigrant Jews who
ran a tailor’s and dressmaker's shop in Stoke Newington, North London.
The idyll of his childhood was interrupted by the outbreak of the war in
1939 when he was evacuated from his Hackney home to rural Cornwall. The
separation from his loving parents, while traumatic, proved another source
for his active imagination and introspection.
He was 14 before he returned to London by which point he had developed a
love of the works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. His first love was
acting and after appearing in several school productions at Hackney Downs
Grammar, he accepted a grant to study at London’s Royal Academy of
Dramatic Arts.
But his heart was not in his studies and two years later he left the
prestigious college. Demonstrating his refusal to conform he was fined
by magistrates in 1949 for refusing to complete his National Service.
Expressing his relief he said: "I could have gone to prison - I took my
toothbrush to the trials - but it so happened that the magistrate was
slightly sympathetic, so I was fined instead."
By 1950 Pinter had begun to publish poetry, under the name Harold Pinta,
but continued to appear on the stage in repertory theatre until 1957.
It was during this period that the frustrated Pinter began to write
for the stage and The Room was published in 1957.
A year later his first full-length play, The Birthday Party, was
produced in the West End and despite closing after just one week
to disastrous reviews, Pinter continued to write at a prolific rate.
It was his second full-length play, The Caretaker (1960) with which
Pinter secured his reputation as one of the country’s foremost new
dramatists and playwrights. Several more works followed in quick
succession and in 1965 one of his most famous plays, The Homecoming,
was published. It told the story of an estranged son who brought home
his new wife to meet his family.
The work won a host of awards including a Tony and the Whitbread Theatre
Award.
Pinter also wrote extensively for the cinema including screenplays for
the The Servant (1963), The Last Tycoon (1974) and The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (1981).
But despite today’s Nobel accolade, he has not always enjoyed a good
relationship with the critics and once questioned why they existed.
"I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people,"
he once said.
The writer’s private life made headlines when he married biographer
Antonia Fraser in 1980 after leaving his first wife, actress Vivien
Merchant, whom he wed in 1956, and with whom he had a son.
In the 1960s Pinter had an affair with broadcaster Joan Bakewell. The
1978 play Betrayal was partly based on his affair, which lasted seven
years and ended in 1969.
He has been less prolific in recent years and in March he appeared to
suggest he had written his last play. "I think I’ve stopped writing
plays now, but I haven’t stopped writing poems. I think I’ve written
29 plays. Isn’t that enough? I think it’s enough for me. I’ve found
other forms now," he said.
In 2002, Pinter he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and
underwent a course of chemotherapy, which he called a "personal
nightmare". He said afterwards: "I’m now older and I’ve been through
a major operation in the past year so I’ve been through the valley of
the shadow of death.
"While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had then,
I’m also a very changed man. But I don’t think I can define precisely
how I’ve changed."
But he has remained active. This week it was announced that he is to act
in a production of Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett as part of the
50th anniversary celebrations of the English Stage Company at London’s
Royal Court Theatre.
Last weekend some of Britain and Ireland’s finest actors got together
at Dublin’s Gate Theatre to celebrate Pinter’s 75th birthday, which
was on Monday.
Pinter is also a cricket-lover and chairman of the Gaieties Cricket
Club. He once said: "I tend to think that cricket is the greatest
thing that God ever created on Earth - certainly greater than sex,
although sex isn't too bad either."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1823922,00.html
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