
Writing
Harold Pinter
Born — Died
1930-10-10 — 2008-12-24
Place of birth
Hackney, London, England, UK
Known for
Writing
Credits
80 titles
Harold Pinter CH CBE (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that 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 for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), 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 ra…
Known for
5.6The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.
The South Bank Show
1978
NRThe Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway productions and performances, and an award is given for regional theatre.
Tony Awards
1956
5.2An anthology series of television plays which aired on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured.
The Wednesday Play
1964
7.2Theatre 625 is a British television drama anthology series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC2 from 1964 to 1968. It was one of the first regular programmes in the line-up of the channel, and the title referred to its production and transmission being in the higher-definition 625-line format, which only BBC2 used at the time.
Theatre 625
1964
8.7In-depth interviews with hard-hitting questions and sensitive topics being covered as famous personalities from all walks of life talk about the highs and lows in their lives.
HARDtalk
1997
7.0An anthology of plays and novels adapted into feature length TV movies, broadcast on BBC2 from September 1977 to April 1979.
BBC2 Play of the Week
1977
Film credits
2000s · 9 titles
6.0A British spy is banished to Panama after having an affair with an ambassador's mistress. Once there he makes connection with a local tailor with a nefarious past and connections to all of the top political and gangster figures in Panama. The tailor also has a wife, who works for the Panamanian president and a huge debt. The mission is to learn what the President intends to do with the Canal.
The Tailor of Panama
2001
7.3A renowned professor is forced to reassess her life when she is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer.
Wit
2001
6.3Locked in a high-tech English manor, bound in a deadly duel of wits, Andrew Wyke and Milo Tindle come together as English gentlemen to discuss the matter of Wyke's wife: the woman both are sleeping with.
Sleuth
2007
10.0Follows the "Beckett on Film" project, which produced film adaptations of writer Samuel Beckett's nineteen stage plays. The documentary features excerpts from the "Beckett on Film" versions of "Not I", "Krapp's Last Tape", "Endgame", "What Where", and "Waiting for Godot".
Check the Gate: Putting Beckett on Film
2003
6.4An autocratic Director (Harold Pinter) and his Assistant (Rebecca Pidgeon) put the final touches to the last scene of some kind of dramatic presentation, which consists entirely of a man (John Gielgud) standing still onstage.
Catastrophe
2001
NR2001 theatre production of Harold Pinter's one-act play considered his "statement about the human rights abuses of totalitarian governments."
One for the Road
2001
NRNobel Lecture delivered on video by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter (1930–2008), who was at the time hospitalised and unable to travel to Stockholm to deliver it in person.
Art, Truth and Politics
2005
NRA 69 year old man sits alone on his last birthday and listens to the past. Krapp's Last Tape is an extraordinary study of mortality, creativity and memory. A television relay of the 2006 Royal Court Theatre production of Samuel Beckett's critically acclaimed play, starring Harold Pinter.
Krapp's Last Tape
2007
A unique look into the creative process of playwright Harold Pinter, featuring unprecedented access to him rehearsing scenes with actors, giving masterclasses, and being interviewed by his friend Henry Woolf.
Working with Pinter
2007
1990s · 5 titles
6.7Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, where she is treated poorly by most except her cousin Edmund. Her life is complicated by the arrival of the worldly Mary and Henry Crawford.
Mansfield Park
1999
4.7The sexual rivalries over a new, potentially great rock'n'roll singer between a nightclub owner and a local gangster cause unrest and eventually lead to murder.
Mojo
1997
5.6A biography of the English mathematician Alan Turing, who was one of the inventors of the digital computer and one of the key figures in the breaking of the Enigma code, used by the Germans to send secret orders to their U-boats in World War II. Turing was also a homosexual in Britain at a time when this was illegal, besides being a security risk.
Breaking the Code
1996
NRCorin Redgrave presents a portrait of his father, Michael Redgrave, exploring his personality, nature and what he was like as a father. He uses family photographs and letters and his father's diaries and autobiography, and produces a picture of a complicated and troubled man who was bisexual, a heavy drinker and emotionally distant and cold as a father. Includes contributions from Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, as well as Harold Pinter and Diana Menuhin. Also contains clips from several of Michael Redgrave's films.
Michael Redgrave: My Father
1997
Documentary arguing against the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo
Against the War
1999
1980s · 3 titles
6.3Two separate people, a man and a woman, find something very stirring about the sea turtles in their tank at the London Zoo. They meet and form an odd, but sympathetic camaraderie as they plan to steal two of the turtles and free them into the ocean.
Turtle Diary
1985
NRAn event organised by CND pits the bomb against poetry. Hear artists who hoped that words and rhymes could put an end to destructive times.
Poets Against the Bomb
1981
6.8It is Stanley's birthday, but the party he is given is not quite what he expects. [A BBC production broadcast on the Theatre Night series.]
The Birthday Party
1987
1970s · 3 titles
6.5In 1939, Sir Robert Thorndyke takes aim at Adolf Hitler with a high powered rifle, but the shot misses its mark. Captured and tortured by the Gestapo and left for dead, Sir Robert makes his way back to England where he discovers the Gestapo has followed him. Knowing that his government would turn him over to German authorities, Sir Robert goes underground in his battle with his pursuers.
Rogue Male
1976
6.1Fresh-faced young Michael Rimmer worms his way into an opinion poll company and is soon running the place. He uses this as a springboard to get into politics and in the mini-skirted flared-trousered world of 1970 Britain starts to rise through the Tory ranks.
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer
1970
4.4In the late 1930s, three reclusive middle-aged spinster sisters live on their run down family estate in Ireland. Otto Beck, a perpetual graduate student from Bavaria with a habit of making pompous declamations, rents the back lodge to work on his esoteric thesis. Imogen Langrishe, the least repressed of the sisters, begins an affair with Otto. Imogen takes the love affair seriously, but Otto just enjoys the cheap lodging and the comfort of Imogen.
Langrishe, Go Down
1978
1960s · 8 titles
7.6An indolent aristocrat gets more than he bargained for when he hires a competent but silently devious manservant.
The Servant
1963
6.4Stephen is a professor at Oxford University who is caught in a rut and feels trapped by his life in both academia and marriage. One of his students, William, is engaged to the beautiful Anna, and Stephen becomes enamored of the younger woman. These three people become linked together by a horrible car crash, with flashbacks providing details into the lives of each person and their connection to the others in this brooding English drama.
Accident
1967
7.4Aston, a quiet, reserved man, lives alone in a top-floor cluttered room of a small abandoned house in a poor London district. He befriends and takes in Mac Davies, an old derelict who has been fired from a menial job in a café. In time Aston offers him a job as caretaker of the house. Aston's brother, Mick - a taunting, quasi-sadist - harasses the derelict when his brother is away, countermanding his orders...
The Caretaker
1964
NRAn uneasy friendship between an introspective loner and a more gregarious man is renewed when the latter turns up at the former's basement flat one rainy night accompanied by an enigmatic, beautiful, mostly silent, girlfriend.
The Basement
1967
7.0Against the wishes of his domineering mother, Albert Stokes attends a work party. But the evening is not the escape he was hoping for.
A Night Out
1960
6.0The last of five animated shorts directed by Gerald Potterton for Pinter People, voiced by Harold Pinter and Donald Pleasence.
Last to Go
1969
5.6A 1964 BBC adaptation of Sartre's "No Exit."
In Camera
1964
‘This week in Britain’ was one of a series of magazine films or Cinemagazines produced by the COI for consumption abroad to promote Britain and the Commonwealth. Produced between 1959 and 1979, and shown in cinemas as well as on television, each film in the series presented a cultural or topical item of interest. The 199th ‘This Week in Britain’ featured the making of Harold Pinter’s famous 1960 play ‘The Caretaker’. In 2005 Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This Week in Britain #199: The Caretaker
1962
Series credits
5.6The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.
The South Bank Show
1978
5.6The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.
The South Bank Show
1978
NRThe Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway productions and performances, and an award is given for regional theatre.
Tony Awards
1956
5.2An anthology series of television plays which aired on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured.
The Wednesday Play
1964
7.2Theatre 625 is a British television drama anthology series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC2 from 1964 to 1968. It was one of the first regular programmes in the line-up of the channel, and the title referred to its production and transmission being in the higher-definition 625-line format, which only BBC2 used at the time.
Theatre 625
1964
8.7In-depth interviews with hard-hitting questions and sensitive topics being covered as famous personalities from all walks of life talk about the highs and lows in their lives.
HARDtalk
1997
7.0An anthology of plays and novels adapted into feature length TV movies, broadcast on BBC2 from September 1977 to April 1979.
BBC2 Play of the Week
1977
6.7A weekly BBC Two magazine programme focusing on the best of the week's arts and culture news, covering books, art, film, architecture and more.
The Culture Show
2004
NRA series of dramas featuring staged theatre plays.
Theatre Night
1985
NRAn attempt by NBC to emulate the success of the CBS hit The Twilight Zone, this hour-long anthology series showcased different actors, stories and creative talent each week.
NBC Experiment in Television
1967
Behind the camera
6.5In this story-within-a-story, Anna is an actress starring opposite Mike in a period piece about the forbidden love between their respective characters, Sarah and Charles. Both actors are involved in serious relationships, but the passionate nature of the script leads to an off-camera love affair as well. While attempting to maintain their composure and professionalism, Anna and Mike struggle to come to terms with their infidelity.
The French Lieutenant's Woman
1981
6.1In a dystopian, polluted right-wing religious tyranny, a young woman is put in sexual slavery on account of her now rare fertility.
The Handmaid's Tale
1990
7.6An indolent aristocrat gets more than he bargained for when he hires a competent but silently devious manservant.
The Servant
1963
6.8British teenager Leo Colston spends a summer in the countryside, where he develops a crush on the beautiful young aristocrat Marian. Eager to impress her, Leo becomes the "go-between" for Marian, delivering secret romantic letters to Ted Burgess, a handsome neighboring farmer.
The Go-Between
1971
6.3Monroe Stahr, a successful movie producer, pursues a beautiful and elusive young woman — all the while working himself to death.
The Last Tycoon
1976
5.9An Italian diplomat's son follows and seduces English lovers in Venice.
The Comfort of Strangers
1990
5.9After two British Secret Intelligence Service agents are murdered at the hands of a cryptic neo-Nazi group known as Phoenix, the suave agent Quiller is sent to Berlin to investigate.
The Quiller Memorandum
1966
6.3Locked in a high-tech English manor, bound in a deadly duel of wits, Andrew Wyke and Milo Tindle come together as English gentlemen to discuss the matter of Wyke's wife: the woman both are sleeping with.
Sleuth
2007
6.6Jo, the mother of seven children, divorces her second husband in order to marry Jake, a successful but promiscuous screenwriter. Though they are physically and emotionally compatible, they are slowly torn apart.
The Pumpkin Eater
1964
6.4Stephen is a professor at Oxford University who is caught in a rut and feels trapped by his life in both academia and marriage. One of his students, William, is engaged to the beautiful Anna, and Stephen becomes enamored of the younger woman. These three people become linked together by a horrible car crash, with flashbacks providing details into the lives of each person and their connection to the others in this brooding English drama.
Accident
1967
6.6Basements is the title for the omnibus film that brings together two plays by Harold Pinter – The Dumb Waiter and The Room – each, once again, set in a single location.
Basements
1987
6.0Joseph K. awakes one morning, to find two strange men in his room, telling him he has been arrested. Joseph is not told what he is charged with, and despite being "arrested," is allowed to remain free and go to work. But despite the strange nature of his arrest, Joseph soon learns that his trial, however odd, is very real, and tries desperately to spare himself from the court's judgement.
The Trial
1993
4.4Set in the rarefied world of West End boutique owners and fashion designers, The Collection takes as its departure point the moment when four elegant lives are suddenly shaken by the suggestion of infidelity. The sinister anonymous phone call that disturbs Harry Kane at four o'clock in the morning becomes increasingly hard to establish...
The Collection
1976
7.0Mysteries abound. What is going on between the wife and her brother? Are they indeed brother and sister? Sisson has his doubts about that … . Why does Sisson feel that there must be something wrong with his eyes, although he knows that he can see clearly and his eye doctor has assured him that his vision is perfect? He forces his secretary to tie a chiffon scarf over his eyes, and then he is able to make a pass at her, in response to one of her many come-ons. Ordinary events assume a sinister tinge. Sisson's two sons, giving him the deadpan treatment that little boys have been inflicting on their elders from time immemorial, seem as eerie as characters out of a ghost story. Always the questions remain. Is there a conspiracy against Sisson. Wikipedia
Tea Party
1965
6.7Attorney Henry Strauss grew up in Germany, but left the country with his Jewish family during the rise of the Third Reich. Still wondering about what happened to his boyhood friend Konradin Von Lohenburg, Strauss travels back to Germany for the first time since he was a young man, bringing up some painful memories.
Reunion
1989
6.5Based on Harold Pinter's enigmatic play about a boarder in a British seaside dwelling who is visited by two strangers. They torment him verbally, ask him idiotic unanswerable questions, force him to sit down and stand up, and give him a "party". Then, eventually, they take him away, a tongue-tied idiot. The trivial becomes the terrible, and with it a certain wonder, a certain pity.
The Birthday Party
1968
6.3Two separate people, a man and a woman, find something very stirring about the sea turtles in their tank at the London Zoo. They meet and form an odd, but sympathetic camaraderie as they plan to steal two of the turtles and free them into the ocean.
Turtle Diary
1985
8.0In June 2009, a group Britain's leading actors gathered for one night only to perform a celebration of the work of Harold Pinter at the National Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson. The team who made the acclaimed Harold Pinter documentaries for BBC's Arena was there to record this unique performance.
Harold Pinter: A Celebration
2010
NRThe story of two brothers and a tramp. Harold Pinter's first major success as a dramatist.
The Caretaker
1981
7.4Aston, a quiet, reserved man, lives alone in a top-floor cluttered room of a small abandoned house in a poor London district. He befriends and takes in Mac Davies, an old derelict who has been fired from a menial job in a café. In time Aston offers him a job as caretaker of the house. Aston's brother, Mick - a taunting, quasi-sadist - harasses the derelict when his brother is away, countermanding his orders...
The Caretaker
1964
7.0'No Man's Land' is a play by Harold Pinter written in 1974 and first performed in 1975. In this 1978, TV adaptation, a seedy poet shows up at the home of a rich writer and they start reminiscing about the 'past,' in a menacing, Pinteresque fashion.
No Man's Land
1978
6.1An affair between a literary agent and his best friend's wife, unfolding in reverse-chronological order.
Betrayal
1983
9.0A controller in a London cab office looks for a driver to pick up a fare from Victoria Station. The driver who answers has never heard of Victoria Station. And he already has a "passenger on board", albeit a very unusual one.
Victoria Station
2003
A middle aged couple, housekeeper and chauffeur sit in the huge bare kitchen of a country house pursuing their own thoughts aloud in a ghastly semblance of conversation. Doollee.com
Landscape
1995
A middle aged couple, housekeeper and chauffeur sit in the huge bare kitchen of a country house pursuing their own thoughts aloud in a ghastly semblance of conversation. Doollee.com
Landscape
1995
8.0In World War II England, a woman is approached by a man claiming to work as an intelligence agent who has found out her lover is a spy. He promises to not arrest him if she'll have a relationship with him.
The Heat of the Day
1989
6.0A sophisticated suburban couple try to enliven their marriage with erotic role-playing, but find their new games even more repressive than before.
The Lover
1963
6.7Butley is set in Queen Mary’s College, London and focuses on two English instructors, Ben Butley, a middle-aged former T. S. Eliot expert whose life is now in a shambles, and his protégé, Joey, a homosexual. With both Joey and his wife leaving, Butley faces a life alone, fighting back with wit, obscenity and booze.
Butley
1974
6.0In a dreary North London flat, the site of perpetual psychological warfare, a philosophy professor visits his family after a nine-year absence and introduces the four men - father, uncle and two brothers - to his wife.
The Homecoming
1973
NRAn uneasy friendship between an introspective loner and a more gregarious man is renewed when the latter turns up at the former's basement flat one rainy night accompanied by an enigmatic, beautiful, mostly silent, girlfriend.
The Basement
1967
NRSet in the jungle of the Congo Free State in 1887–88, the story begins after explorer Henry Morton Stanley, has gone to relieve Emin Pasha, governor of Equatoria, from a siege by Mahdist forces. He leaves behind him a 'rear column' with supplies at the Yambuya camp on the Aruwimi River and instructs them to wait until the Arab slave trader, Tippu Tib, has brought 600 more porters before following on to Equatoria. The play follows the story of the men left waiting in the camp. The officers depicted in the play are based on historical figures.
The Rear Column
1980
9.0Two hit-men, Ben and Gus, are waiting in a basement room for their assignment. As the play begins, Ben, the senior member of the team, is reading a newspaper, and Gus, the junior member, is tying his shoes. Gus asks Ben many questions as he gets ready for their job and tries to make tea.
The Dumb Waiter
1999
4.7A young actor and an angst-ridden city worker fight over a girl watched over by a disturbed chum. The play is concerned with three young men, Len, Pete and Mark, and the scene of action shifts back and forth between Len's house and Mark's. Sometimes all three come together, sometimes only two, and often Len is on stage alone. There are conversations and soliloquies filled with the brilliant convolutions of thought, the sudden flashes of truth which distinguish Pinter's unique style, with the mood ranging from calm introspection to explosive outpouring. Much of what is said hints at deeper thoughts left unspoken, and the sense of horror and alienation which often emerges is a searing indictment of our life and times. We meet, we talk, we tear at each other, but our insularity is seldom penetrated. We are together but alone, as though life were a mirror which reflects only our own image.
The Dwarfs
2002
5.0A dysfunctional couple remember a better time.
Landscape
1983
6.5At a posh cocktail party, various plans are made, and a missing guest turns up late.
Party Time
1992
6.5At a posh cocktail party, various plans are made, and a missing guest turns up late.
Party Time
1992
An elderly homosexual and a married woman are both intrigued by the same man.
The Collection
—
NRNobel Lecture delivered on video by the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter (1930–2008), who was at the time hospitalised and unable to travel to Stockholm to deliver it in person.
Art, Truth and Politics
2005
7.0A man sits alone remembering his love affair with the girl his best friend won.
Monologue
1973
6.8It is Stanley's birthday, but the party he is given is not quite what he expects. [A BBC production broadcast on the Theatre Night series.]
The Birthday Party
1987

