'Pinter's Second Act: Forget the Nobelist's plays-watch him act'

article by MAC ROGERS here.

In 1955, 50 years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter was a supporting player at the Colchester Repertory Company, acting under the name David Baron. That same year, while rotating through a series of drawing-room dramas and Agatha Christie thrillers, Pinter began work on his first play, an eerie one-act called The Room. Five years later his masterpiece The Caretaker vaulted him to international fame, and he never needed to take another acting role for money again. Yet Pinter has continued to pursue acting through a number of small, vivid film roles, employing his giant frame and low, thunderous voice to bring life to a whole rogue's gallery of thugs, tyrants, and misanthropes. The nature of these roles is no coincidence: The characters that he plays embody the same obsessions and moral anger that inform his writing. Pinter the actor is a natural extension of Pinter the writer.