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).
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