winning British playwright Harold Pinter, one of theater's biggest names for nearly half a century, has died of cancer aged 78. His second wife Lady Antonia Fraser told the Guardian newspaper: “He was a great, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten.” Pinter had a number of awards bestowed on him during a long and distinguished career, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. In its citation, the Nobel academy said Pinter was “generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century” and declared him to be an author “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms.” Pinter was best known for his plays, including his 1960 breakthrough production “The Caretaker”, “The Dumb Waiter” and “The Birthday Party.” But he was also a screenwriter, actor and director and in recent years a vociferous campaigner against human rights abuses, including the occupation of Iraq by Western armed forces. He joined other artists such as Blur and Ken Loach in sending a letter to Downing Street opposing the 2003 invasion. In Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech, he launched a lengthy and strong attack on US foreign policy, particularly over the Iraq war. “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them,” he said. “You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Pinter was awarded a CBE in 1966, the German Shakespeare Prize in 1970, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1973 and the David Cohen British Literature Prize in 1995. He was also awarded a number of honorary degrees. Pinter stopped writing plays in 2005 and focused on poetry, alongside forays into acting and screenwriting. Following treatment for cancer of the oesophagus diagnosed in 2002, he returned to the stage, winning rave reviews for his performance of Beckett's monologue, “Krapp's Last Tape”, in London in 2006. In his final years, he was also a vocal critic of the Iraq war, calling the 2003 US-led invasion a “bandit act” which showed “absolute contempt for the concept of international law.” Pinter was born into a Jewish family in the London borough of Hackney. His grandparents had fled persecution in Poland and Odessa. He was attracted to acting from an early age and his political activism was evident when in 1948 he refused, as a conscientious objector, to do National Service. After two spells at drama school he joined he joined Anew McMaster's Shakespearean Irish touring company in 1951 and wrote his first play, The Room, for Bristol University's recently established drama department in 1957. Michael Billington, Pinter's biographer, told Sky News television he would remember him “above all as a man of generosity”. “Harold was a political figure, a polemicist and carried on fierce battles against American foreign policy and often British foreign policy, but in private he was the most incredibly loyal of friends and generous of human beings,” he said.
