Harold Pinter, playwright, poet, screenwriter, actor, director, and political activist, died on Christmas Eve. According to BBC News, Pinter had suffered from cancer. Born in Hackney, in London’s East End in 1930, the British dramatist penned more than thirty plays during his long career, including The Caretaker, The Room, The Birthday Party, and Ashes to Ashes. To commemorate The Homecoming’s fortieth anniversary on Broadway, New York’s Cort Theater staged a late 2007 revival. Pinter wrote for the screen as well, adapting his own plays, such as Betrayal, and other’s work, such as John Fowles’s novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Both earned Oscar nominations. As a critic of oppressive regimes and torture, and a fierce advocate for worldwide freedom of speech and unilateral nuclear disarmament, Pinter was as outspoken off the page and stage as he was on them. In October 2005, an ailing Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for uncovering “the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” In his acceptance speech, recorded in advance from London, Pinter said, “We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.”