British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, who has been considered the most influential and imitated playwright of his generation, has passed away at the age of 78, his widow announced on Thursday.

 

The dramatist and theatre director, who was also a campaigner against human rights abuses, died on Wednesday after a long battle with cancer, his second wife Antonia Fraser said.

 

Harold Pinter wrote almost three dozen plays and was known for imagining theatrical scenes that suggested desolation, nuisance and intuitive vulnerability. His revolutionary works, including “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker” and “The Homecoming,” usually brought into play just a few characters blocked in fretful discussions so as to pass on a sense of inexplicable dismay, reservation and vagueness with regard to the human mind.

 

Harold Pinter started his theatrical career in the mid-1950s as a repertory actor going by the stage name of David Baron. He wrote 29 plays, 26 screenplays, radio and television sketches, poetry, fiction and essays. In addition, he helmed approximately 50 productions for stage play, TV and big-screen representation.

 

In spite of the fact that his condition began to worsen in 2001, he continued to act and his last performance was delivered in the critically-acclaimed production of Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in October 2006.

 

Apart from the Nobel Prize for literature he was awarded in 2005, Mr. Pinter received 19 honorary degrees and several other honors and awards, including the French Legion d’honneur. He received his last honorary degree from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama on December 10 this year, but was unable to pick it up because of his illness.