After a protracted bout with cancer, the theatre iconoclast and 2005 Nobel Prize for literature winner Harold Pinter died December 24th, 2008. Pinter was known not just as a playwright, but as an actor, theatre director, and a political activist. Since the 1950’s when he broke into the theatre business as a repertory actor using the stage name David Baron, Pinter wrote twenty-nine stage plays, twenty-six screen plays, and a substantial body of poetry, fiction, and essays. He also directed almost 50 stage, television and film productions. He is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. Pinter left instructions for his funeral; at his behest, actor and close friend Michael Gambon read from “No Man’s land” which Pinter wrote in 1974.
“And so I say to you, tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.”
A. T. B. Copyright © 2009
