Antonia Fraser and Michael Billington reflect on the life and work of Harold Pinter – YouTube

.

.

On October 10th 2020, Harold Pinter would have been 90. It was also 60 years since the first production of the play that made Pinter’s name, The Caretaker – which, as Michael Billington revealed in his biography, was written in, and based on, events in the flat at 373 Chiswick High Road where he was living (see extract and picture below).

.
It was also 15 years since Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he accepted in a blistering speech from the studios of Channel 4.

.
In September 2020, the Chiswick Book Festival invited the writers Lady Antonia Fraser, who shared her life with Harold Pinter for 33 years, and Michael Billington, his biographer, to reflect on the playwright’s life and work. They spoke to the Festival director, Torin Douglas, in St Michael & All Angels Church, filmed by Chiswickbuzz – with no audience because of the COVID restrictions. The session was supported by Savills Chiswick.

.

.
In this warm and revealing interview, reported in the Observer (left), they discuss Pinter’s plays and screenplays; his life with Lady Antonia Fraser; how Michael Billington came to write his biography; his love of cricket and politics; the real story behind Betrayal; the night he accepted the Nobel Prize; how the play he wrote in Chiswick catapulted him to fame and fortune – and why Lady Antonia thinks his screenplays have been overshadowed by his plays.

You can watch the interview here on YouTube.
.

.
Harold Pinter & the Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books

.
Harold Pinter is – with WB Yeats – one of two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature to have lived and written in Chiswick. They are remembered on the Chiswick Timeline of Writers and Books, alongside John Osborne, William Thackeray, Alexander Pope, EM Forster, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch, John Betjeman, Nancy Mitford and other distinguished playwrights, poets and novelists. ‘Chiswick may Britain’s most literary location‘ – The Observer.

.
Entry from the Chiswick Timeline Writers Trail:
B) Harold Pinter 1947-2008. Playwright: Wrote The Caretaker when he lived in a first floor flat in Chiswick in the 1950s and 60s, and a tramp was invited to stay. Screenwriter: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Betrayal. Oscar nominee, Best Adapted Screenplay 1981, 1983. Nobel Prize for Literature 2005.
373 Chiswick High Road, W4 4AG (Private house, no access)

.
From Flickr (courtesy Jim Linwood):
373 Chiswick High Road – Where Harold Pinter Wrote The Caretaker

.
373 Chiswick High Road, West London:
Where Harold Pinter Wrote The Caretaker.
.

“Pinter wrote The Caretaker while living in a first floor flat in Chiswick High Road at number 373 [on the left of the photo]. The events that happen in the play are a fairly close transcription of real events. Pinter and his wife Vivien and their very young son Daniel were living in this very modest two room and there was a kindly man who looked after the flat for his brother, in real life his name was Austin. One day Austin brought a tramp he’d met in a café back to the house and the tramp stayed for two or three weeks. Pinter knew the tramp very slightly and then one day he looked through an open door and saw Austin with his back to the tramp gazing out into the garden and the tramp busy putting stuff back into some kind of grubby hold-all, obviously being given his marching orders. All this matters because it then becomes the bones of the plot of The Caretaker. The Caretaker is not an absolute record of reality but it’s based on real events and very closely on that particular part of West London.”
– Harold Pinter by Michael Billington
.

Further references:
Playwright wins Nobel Prize for Literature
The Nobel Prize: Harold Pinter
Renowned Playwright and Political Activist Harold Pinter Dies
Harold Pinter, 373 Chiswick High Road: Notable Abodes
373 Chiswick High Road – Where Harold Pinter Wrote The Caretaker
Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay – nominee
Commemorative plaque for Chiswick home of actor Donald Pleasance
(nominated for a Tony for his performance in The Caretaker)

.

Read more stories via the Writers Tales page.