Harold Pinter, who died at the age of 78 on Christmas Eve, was very likely the only writer ever to win the Nobel Prize, the French Légion d'honneur, and inspire an episode of Seinfeld. He was also a towering enough figure in modern theater to lend his name to a word: "Pinteresque." It was most commonly used in reference to the famous pauses written into his plays, and many a theater lover born during or after Pinter's first period of success knew long before discovering his plays that describing the sight of an actor daring the audience to wonder if he'd just forgotten his lines as Pinteresque was an easy way of seeming smart. More generally, and more and more as Pinter's career went on, it came to stand for the whole mysterious, threatening world he created on stage, a place where everyone seemed to be nursing a secret grudge and perpetually squaring off against and testing each other, and the balance of power kept shifting. Pinter, who attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948, entered theater as an actor and spent twelve years struggling to get by as a member of various repertory companies; for about half that time, he performed under the name "David Baron." His time as a starving young actor in London overlapped with that of Michael Caine, and Caine has often enjoyed telling interviewers about the time good old "David" stormed out of the pub, saying that he was bloody sick to death of this bloody business and was going home to try to write something.

Speaking to The New York Times' Mel Gussow many years later, Pinter would recall that, as an actor, "My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into." As an actor, he--like his American counterpart, Sam Shepard--brought to his writing an inside understanding of the charge that actors get out of the kind of menacing game-playing and shape-shifting that would go on in his plays, and how easily they can impart their excitement in those kinds of roles to the audience. He joined that kind of showmanship to a modernist sense that the hostility he put onstage might seem all the more haunting for seeming oblique in its motivating force, and to a poetic sense of spoken language that immediately joined him, in the minds of critics and the public, to his friend Samuel Beckett (who, as it happened, also died shortly before Christmas, nineteen years ago).

Interviewers who flat out asked Pinter about his working methods and the meaning of his plays soon found that they'd have better spent their evening wrestling greased eels. The facts, as they say on Pushing Daisies, are these: born in 1930 in the London borough of Hackney, he was to be a Jewish evacuee from during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941. That terrifying and confusing experience, coupled to the lonely, brainy boy's entry into school, is widely thought to have forever impacted his view of the world. Writing in Esquire in 1968, Wilfrid Sheed observed that the young Pinter had "had to face the problem of assimilation, by himself, in a series of strange settings, at an age when most boys are concentrating on the best way to keep up their pants. English class apprenticeship is brutal enough if you are born to it. To an outsider like Pinter, it has the extra horror of meaninglessness." In the late fifties and early sixties, Pinter's on-stage chess games seemed very different from the other kinds of English plays that were changing the theater at that time, the "Angry Young Men" plays by such writers as John Osbourne, where hyper-articulate but painfully alienated men expressed their fury at the system, but Pinter was anyone's equal when it came to rage. (Years later, an actor a continent away from a very different kind of working class background--John Malkovich--would tell interviewers that he was drawn into the theater by "the suppressed violence" of Pinter's plays.) Yet so great was his reluctance to be pinned down that he adamantly resisted any political reading of his work.

That changed in the 1980s, when, after a prolonged dust-up in his private life. Pinter had married the actress Vivien Merchant, who would appear in many of his plays and in movies derived both from his plays and original screenplays; they would have a son, Daniel, in 1958. Pinter left Merchant for the best-selling popular historian Antonia Fraser, with whom he lived from 1975 until his death, though it would be another five years before his and Lady Antonia's marriages would be legally dissolved and they could be married. The second marriage was a fairly public and apparently happy one, but the wreckage from Pinter's first marriage would linger. Merchant died of alcoholism in 1982, and in 1993 Pinter's son broke off all contact with him; as a well-regarded writer and musician, he works under the name "Daniel Brand", and for the last fifteen years of his father's life, they never spoke again. The time surrounding Merchant's death coincided with a three-year break Pinter took from playwriting, and when he returned in the mid-1980s, with such plays as One for the Road and Mountain Language, he showed a new willingness to make direct political statements in both his work and his interviews, and even allowed that his earlier plays may well have included "metaphorical" statements on the kind of issues he now addressed head-on. At the same time, he maintained a chilly distance from any autobiographical interpretation of his work, declining, for example, to allow that there might be any connection between his characters' obsessions with lost children and family ties and his son's refusal to reconcile with him.

Many of Pinter's best-known, early plays have been filmed, but, perhaps because they depend so much on the heat and dazzle of live performance, getting the transition from stage to screen to take has often proven problematic. Neither Clive Donner's 1963 The Caretaker nor William Friedkin's 1968 The Birthday Party was a success, though the films are very faithful to the texts. Robert Altman filmed the one-acts The Dumb Waiter and The Room for American network TV in the late 1980s without setting the world on fire; the British TV versions of The Collection (1976), with Laurence Olivier, Helen Mirren, Malcolm MacDowell, and Alan Bates, and No Man's Land (1978), starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, record the not inconsiderable spectacle of phenomenal casts having a go at Pinter's dialogue, but in the context of lesser plays. The 1973 American Film Theater production of The Homecoming, which includes performances by many members of the original cast (including Vivien Merchant as Ruth) and the 1983 Betrayal, with Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons, are better thought of.

But Pinter's strongest impact in movies came through screenplay adaptations of others' work--and he did a surprisingly large number of them, especially as his standard of living improved. Among the ones that stand out are his adaptation of Penelope Mortimer's novel The Pumpkin Eater for Jack Clayton's 1964 film, and the first of his many collaborations with the director Joseph Losey, The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967), both starring Dirk Bogarde. He also wrote Losey's 1970 The Go-Between and prepared a script for a film based on Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past for which Losey was never able to obtain funding; it was published in book form as The Proust Screenplay, and eventually adapted to the stage. His other screenplay credits include The Quiller Memorandum, The Last Tycoon, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Turtle Diary, Reunion, The Handmaid's Tale, The Comfort of Strangers, the 1993 version of Kafka's The Trial, and his final credit, the 2007 remake of Sleuth. He also directed Alan Bates in the 1973 movie of Simon Gray's play Butley.

In the last several years, Pinter seemed to be returning to his old profession, acting. He had always been in the habit of taking bit parts and cameos in movies he's worked on, sometimes taking slightly larger roles under his old alias, "David Baron." Then, in 1996, he took on the substantial role of Goldberg in a TV production of The Birthday Party, and he followed that up with such roles as Emma Thompson's father in the HBO film Wit and the spectral "Uncle Bennie" in John Boorman's The Tailor of Panama, sagely advising his nephew, Geoffrey Rush, to be sincere rather than tell the truth: "Sincerity's a virtue! The truth's an affliction!" In 2005, the same year that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter announced that he was effectively "retired" from playwriting. The next year, he capped his life in the theater with a triumphantly received run of nine performances, playing Beckett's one-man play Krapp's Last Tape at London's Royal Court Theatre. The performance, which was subsequently released on DVD, was given from a motorized wheelchair; Pinter, who was already ill with the cancer that would kill him, was forced to dispense with Beckett's stage direction that his character should stuff himself with bananas during the play.