There aren't many modern artists who lend their name to a style.
Harold Pinter is one, whose plays were characterized by such silence and stillness that "Pinteresque" came to define any sense of menace built with that technique.
I seem to remember one of my public school teachers as being a master of that.
Pinter skipped out of college in favor of drama school, and started writing for the stage. His early works were often dismissed, but slowly critics and audiences alike began to respond to the humor hidden inside the malice.
Playwright and screenwriter David Hare ("The Reader," "The Hours") says that without Pinter's sense of what could be funny, there never would have been a Monty Python.
He started writing for television in 1960 on the British series "Armchair Theatre," and made the move to the big screen a few years later, although he never stopped writing TV or plays.
Pinter adapted his own popular play "The Birthday Party" for screen in 1968; it was directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist) and starred Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee.
He did the same for "The Homecoming," a mad, funny, deeply disturbing twisted family drama.
But he was also very successful adapting the work of others for the screen, including Margaret Atwood's dystopian "The Handmaid's Tale," Kafka's "The Trial" (starring Anthony Hopkins), and, most famously, "The French Lieutenant's Woman," from the novel by John Fowles. You don't get more iconic than the haunting image of Meryl Streep's face half-obscured by her black hood staring out of the poster.
For his adaptation, Pinter received an Academy Award nomination, and he was nominated for another for his adaptation of his own play "Betrayal" two years later in 1984.
His last major film project was to script the remake of Anthony Shaffer's "Sleuth" in 2007, this time starring Jude Law and Michael Caine.
But Pinter had a lot of itches to scratch, so to speak. He started his career as an actor, and continued to dip his feet in that particular water throughout his life, both on stage and screen. He even had a small role in Sleuth, and played Krapp in Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" for TV in 2006.
He was also active politically, speaking out against American foreign policy and Iraq in particular, and turned down a knighthood offered by John Major in 1996.
Pinter died on Christmas Eve, after a career that spanned five decades in theatre and a film and television career almost as long. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, and was a staunch critic of the Iraq War.
He was 78, and survived by his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, one of Britain's most respected historians.
You can just guess these two would be interesting dinner guests... Unless Harold was feeling particularly Pinteresque.
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