Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, dead at 78
p2pnet news view | Mobiles:- “I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth,” Harold Pinter once said, “certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.”
That was Harold Pinter, British playwright and Nobel laureate in a talk with The Guardian’s Andy Bull.
“No harm, then, that the game should be the subject of his last interview, given in late October at his home in London,” says the story, going on:
“His health failing, Pinter was in nostalgic mood, recalling a childhood in Hackney, east London, during the blitz and his time as an evacuee. ‘I first watched cricket during the war. At one point we were all evacuated from our house when there was an air raid. We opened the door and our garden, with this large lilac tree, was alight all along the back wall. We were evacuated straight away. Though not before I took my cricket bat’.”
“Actors starring in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land in London’s West End have paid tribute on stage to the playwright,” says the BBC, adding:
“It was the first Pinter play to be performed since his death from cancer. After a sell-out at the Duke of York theatre, actor David Bradley told the audience the world had lost “one of the greatest literary figures of all time”.
“Sir Michael Gambon also read a passage from the play which Pinter had asked him to read out at his funeral. He performed the speech to a silent audience, many of whom wept as he read aloud.
The excerpt concluded: “And so I say to you, tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.”
Pinter wrote more than 30 plays, including The Caretaker and The Birthday Party, says the story.
He had a substantial career in the cinema as well as in the theatre, says The Independent.
“As a character actor, Pinter popped up in unlikely places. Late in his career, he was seen in full costume garb as the booming voiced patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram in Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1998), as a low-life villain in Jez Butterworth’s Mojo (1997) and as the mysterious, ghostlike Uncle Benny in John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama (2001). As this range of characters suggest, Pinter was surprisingly versatile. He could run the gamut from aristocrats to East End thugs.”
His writing for the cinema, “covered a remarkably wide spectrum,” says the story, adding:
“He scripted thrillers, costume dramas and one very overwrought sci-fi yarn (the ill-starred adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale.) He even directed a film, a 1974 adaptation of Simon Gray’s play Butley starring Alan Bates as an academic whose life is coming apart at the seams.”
A vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, Pinter died on Christmas Eve at the age of 78.
The Guardian – groupPlaywright Harold Pinter’s last interview, December 27, 2008
BBC - West End pays tribute to Pinter, December 27, 2008
The Independent – Harold Pinter: True star of the screen, December 27, 2008
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