Birthdays
Harold Pinter
(10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English
playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential
modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His
best-known plays include The Birthday
Party (1957), The Homecoming
(1964), and Betrayal (1978),
each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works
include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981),
The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or
acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others'
works.
Pinter was born
and raised in east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School.
He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing
poetry. He continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and
worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. He had
a son, Daniel born in 1958.
Pinter's career
as a playwright began with a production of The Room in 1957. His second play, The Birthday Party, closed after eight performances, but was
enthusiastically reviewed by critic Harold Hobson. His early works were
described by critics as "comedy of menace". Later plays such as No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978) became known as
"memory plays". He appeared as an actor in productions of his own
work on radio and film. Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes, and other
honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the French Légion
d'honneur in 2007
Contributed by Oleg Kovalenko
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ReplyDeleteTim Burton looks to the past with this crowdpleasing kiddie riff on the Frankenstein myth, which opens this year's London film festival.Tim Burton's new movie is a feature-length treatment of one of the first things he ever made: a 1984 short originally rejected by Disney for being too "dark". Well, this is actually a sentimental kind of retro gothic lite, appearing under the Disney banner: very Tim Burton and also very Steven Spielberg, whose influence was at its most potent when the story was conceived: ET meets The Munsters.
ReplyDeleteSir Ralph Richardson(12/19/1902 – 10/10/1983) - English actor, one of a group of theatrical knights of the mid-20th century who, though more closely associated with the stage, also appeared in several classic films.
ReplyDeleteRichardson first became known for his work on stage in the 1930s. In the 1940s, together with Laurence Olivier, he ran the Old Vic Company. He continued on stage and in films into the early 1980s and was especially praised for his comedic roles. In his later years he was celebrated for his theatre work with his old friend John Gielgud. Among his most famous roles were Peer Gynt, Falstaff, John Gabriel Borkman and Hirst in Pinter's No Man's Land.
"You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator."
As for Harold Pinter, he began his career as an actor, but he quickly turned his attention to writing and became one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and important playwrights. Pinter loves to play with words, and many of his works feature witty banter between characters interspersed with long pauses.
ReplyDeleteEssential Facts
1) Harold Pinter’s stage name as an actor was David Baron.
2) Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the Legion d’honneur in 2007.
3) Pinter is a huge cricket fan. He has said, “One of my main obsessions in life is the game of cricket—I play and watch and read about it all the time.”
4) Pinter has been vocal about his politics and was once thrown out of the U.S. embassy in Turkey.
5) Pinter publicly announced in 2005 that he was retiring from playwriting. Since then, he has written a screenplay, short dramatic sketches, and a great deal of poetry.
One of the most famous Pinter's plays, "THE BIRTHDAY PARTY", was the playwright's first commercially-produced, full-length play. He began writing the work after acting in a theatrical tour, during which, in Eastbourne, England, he had lived in "filthy insane digs". There he became acquainted with "a great bulging scrag of a woman" and a man who stayed in the seedy place. The flophouse became the model for the rundown boarding house of the play and the woman and her tenant the models, respectively, for the characters of Meg Boles and Stanley Webber.
ReplyDeleteThe Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town, "probably on the south coast, not too far from London". Two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrive supposedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turn Stanley's apparently innocuous birthday party organized by Meg into a nightmare.
10 facts about Harold Pinter:
ReplyDelete1. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1966 and a Companion of Honour in the 2002 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to Literature and Drama.
2. Celebrated by the Manitoba Theatre Centre in a festival named Pinter Fest (January 2003). Several of his works were performed, such as, "Night School" and "The Hot House".
3. He allegedly declined a British Knighthood in 1996.
4. He was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award in 1996 (1995 season) for the Special Award for his lifetime achievement to the theatre.
5. In the early 1960s, he had an extra-marital affair with broadcaster Joan Bakewell. Later, Pinter went on to write what became the movie Betrayal (1983), which told the story of their affair.
6. Supported a motion to impeach British Prime Minister Tony Blair after the Iraq war.
7. Underwent radiation treatment for cancer of the esophagus in 2002.
8. Joined the Donald Wolfit Shakespearean company in 1953.
9. Brother-in-law of Rachel Billington and Tom Pakenham.
10. His play, "The Caretaker," was nominated for a 1976 Joseph Jefferson Award for Play Production at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, Illinois.