The Homecoming (1965) - After teaching philosophy at an American university for six years, Teddy brings his wife Ruth home to London to meet his family: his father Max, a nagging, aggressive ex-butcher and other member of the all-male household. At the end Teddy returns alone to his university job in America. No one needs him and he needs no one. Ruth stays as a mother or whore to his family. Everyone needs her. - Similar motifs - the battle for domination in a sexual context - recur in Landscape and Silence (both 1969), and In Old Times (1971)
Several of Pinter's plays were originally written for British radio or TV. From the 1970s Pinter have directed a number of stage plays and the American Film Theatre production of Butler (1974). In 1977 he published a screenplay based on Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps perdu. Closely associated with the director Peter Hall (1930-), he became an associate director of the National Theatre after Hall was nominated as the successor of Lawrence Olivier. Pinter has received many awards, including Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear in 1963, BAFTA awards in 1965 and in 1971, the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize in 1970, the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or in 1971, and the Commonwealth Award in 1981. He was made CBE in 1966 and in 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theatre. Pinter was married to the actress Vivien Merchant. They divorced in 1981. In the same years Pinter married the biographer Lady Antonia Fraser. Pinter has written a number of screenplays, including The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971), The Last Tycoon (1974, dir. by Elia Kazan), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981, novel by John Fowles), Betrayal (1982), Turtle Diary (1985), Reunion (1989), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and The Trial by Franz Kafka (1990). In the 1990s Pinter became more active as a director than as a playwright. He oversaw David Mamet's Oleanna and several works by Simon Gray. For further reading: Kafka and Pinter by Raymond Armstrong (1999); The Life and Work of Harold Pinter by Michael Billington (1997); Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre by D. Keith Peacock (1997); Harold Pinter: A Question of Timing by Martin S. Regal (1995); The Pinter Ethic by Penelope Prentice (1994); Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power by Marc Silverstein (1993); Harold Pinter by Chittanranjan Misra (1993); Critical Essays on Harold Pinter by Steven H. Gale (1990); Pinter in Play by Susan Hollis Merritt (1990); Harold Pinter by Volker Strunk (1989); Pinter's Female Portraits by Elizabeth Sakellaridou (1988); Harold Pinter, ed. by Stephen H.