Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...directing a play in London called Otherwise Engaged, and that, said Actress Vivien Merchant, is just what her husband, Playwright Harold Pinter, 44, has been for the past several months. Last week Merchant, 46, announced that she was divorcing the author of The Homecoming and The Caretaker after 19 years of marriage. The reason: his alleged love affair with Lady Antonia Fraser, 42, bestselling historian (Mary Queen of Scots) and willful social lioness of London. "It seems he is possessed by Lady Antonia," said Merchant. "She has cast a spell over him. How she can do it with six children...
...Pinter, by contrast, is the only son of a Jewish tailor from London's rugged East End. Darkly handsome with thinning hair, he spent almost a decade as a stage actor, turned to writing in the 1950s, and soon developed into an acclaimed, though sometimes confounding chronicler of English subsociety. He once called cricket, the theater and his family his three main obsessions in life, and for the past 19 years his marriage has been completely free of scandal. Now, apparently, he has become Lady Antonia's most intellectually prestigious admirer, and the one most jealous...
That did not daunt the irate Vivien Merchant, however, who answered her husband's pleas for discretion by making the whole plot public. "I had no idea she would talk about the matter," grumbled Pinter. "She told me she wouldn't." Though he is no longer at their $250,000 house overlooking Regents Park, his wife says that he has not carried away his books or his clothes. "He didn't need to take a pair of shoes," snipped the woman scorned. "He can always wear some of Antonia's.* She has very big feet...
Although Shaw has appeared in over two dozen movies (he was the conned con man in The Sting), the theater is his true territory. A graduate of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he starred in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and, on Broadway, in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker and Old Times. Pinter returned the compliment by directing The Man in the Glass Booth, a play Shaw adapted from one of his own five novels. For all this, Shaw still resents what he calls "the English snobbishness about the superiority of acting onstage." He likes...
...Pinter people tend to live ineffably in the present and represent nothing out side themselves. Events have no proximate causes, let alone final Aristotelian ones. But in his last play, Old Times, Pinter's characters began to be defined by their uncertain memory of the past. Now the particulars of the present are beginning to be bounded by the dark inevitability of the future, the no man's land of death in life. The new and more abstract world that Britain's leading playwright has begun to explore at 44 is still imperfectly mapped, and he will...