Harold Pinter’s wife announced the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s death after a long battle with throat cancer. He was 78. Pinter, whose distinctive contribution to the stage was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on Wednesday, according to his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.

"Not only has Harold Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature, by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension," added British playwright David Hare, who also writes politically charged dramas.

Pinter was known for such plays as "The Birthday Party" (1957), "The Homecoming" (1964), "No Man's Land" (1974), "Mountain Language" (1988), and "Celebration" (2000). Pinter's later plays were more overtly political, with works such as "One for the Road" (1984) and "The New World Order" (1991) focusing on state torture.

Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, was a vocal opponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, likening U.S. President George W. Bush's administration to the Nazis and calling former Prime Minister Tony Blair a "mass murderer." The academy for the Nobel Prize said in its citation that Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century."

Harold Pinter was born in London on October 10, 1930. He was the son of Jewish immigrants, his father a dressmaker, his mother "a wonderful cook," he once recalled. In 1948 he was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, then as now one of Great Britain's most renowned drama schools. But the RADA didn't take; Pinter hated the school and dropped out after two terms. He became an actor and turned to playwriting with his first work, "The Room," in 1957. Later that year he wrote "The Birthday Party," a "comedy of menace," in the words of one critic.     .

Pinter wrote dozens of plays, essays and poems. His lifelong friend, actor and director Henry Woolf, says Pinter's major contribution was what became known as the "theater of menace."

Pinter credited Samuel Beckett, among others, as an influence. He starred in a production of Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" in 2006. In turn, writers such as David Mamet and Sam Shepard followed Pinter's elliptical lead.

Pinter was diagnosed with cancer in 2002, and underwent treatment for cancer of the esophagus. Following that, he returned to the stage in 2006 where he won rave reviews for his performance of Beckett's monologue, "Krapp's Last Tape,” playing from a motorized wheelchair in a limited run at the Royal Court Theatre to sold-out audiences and "ecstatic" critical reviews.

He was married first to the actress Vivien Merchant. Following a 1980 divorce, Pinter married writer-historian Lady Antonia Fraser.