The Stage

Broadway pays tribute to Pinter

Published Wednesday 31 December 2008 at 12:30 by Judd Hollander

On Tuesday, December 30 at 7pm, all Broadway theatre marquees were dimmed for one minute in honour of Harold Pinter - playwright, actor, screenwriter, novelist, poet and director.

Pinter passed away on December 24 at the age of 78, following a long battle with cancer of the oesophagus. He is survived by his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.

During his career, Printer wrote a total of 29 plays, seven of which were produced on Broadway. He also directed four plays on the Great White Way. Pinter’s first production on Broadway was his work The Caretaker in 1961, his last being a revival of The Homecoming in 2007.

Pinter was nominated for a Tony Award three times as a writer, winning in 1967 for The Homecoming. He was also nominated for his direction of Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth in 1969, as well as for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Foreign Play in 1977 for his work No Man’s Land.

Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 and was nominated for an Academy Award twice.

Charlotte St Martin, executive director of the Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway industry, said: “Harold Pinter has been called one of the most influential and imitated playwrights of his generation. He repeated on several occasions that he had ‘written 29 damn plays, isn’t that enough?’. We are so grateful for his genius and distinct contributions to modern theatre.”

Pinter was born on October 10, 1930 in Hackney, London.