Harold Pinter (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others’ works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others’ works.

He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing National service as a conscientious objector.

His early works were described by critics as “comedy of menace”. Later plays such as No Man’s Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978) became known as “memory plays”.

He appeared as an actor in productions of his own work on radio and film. He also undertook a number of roles in works by other writers. He directed nearly 50 productions for stage, theatre and screen.

Pinter received over 50 awards, prizes, and other honours, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005: “in his plays [he] uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” Also, the French Légion d’honneur in 2007.

Pinter acknowledges the influence of Samuel Beckett, particularly on his early work; they became friends, sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments.

In his last 25 years, Pinter increasingly focused his essays, interviews and public appearances directly on political issues.

He died from liver cancer on 24 December 2008.

A Kind of Alaska, by Harold Pinter (Playing time: 37:07)

( A woman awakes to a world she does not know.)

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Violet Lucille Fletcher (March 28, 1912 – August 31, 2000) was an American screenwriter of film, radio and television. Her credits include The Hitch-Hiker, an original radio play written for Orson Welles and adapted for a notable episode of The Twilight Zone television series.

From 1934 to 1939, Lucille Fletcher worked as a music librarian, copyright clerk and publicity writer at CBS. There she met her future husband, composer Bernard Herrmann, who conducted the CBS orchestra.

Fletcher’s first success came when one of her magazine stories, “My Client Curley,” was adapted for radio by Norman Corwin. Broadcast on the Columbia Workshop March 7, 1940, it was later adapted for the 1944 Cary Grant film, Once Upon a Time.

Herrmann wrote the score for the November 17, 1941, radio debut of Fletcher’s famous story, The Hitch-Hiker on The Orson Welles Show.

Fletcher’s greatest success, Sorry, Wrong Number – our current offering – premiered on May 25, 1943, as an episode of the radio series Suspense. Agnes Moorehead created the role in the first performance and again in several later radio productions. It was broadcast nationwide seven times between 1943 and 1948.

Barbara Stanwyck starred in the 1948 film version of Sorry, Wrong Number and, in 1952, performed the original radio play over the airwaves. A 1959 version produced for the CBS radio series Suspense received a 1960 Edgar Award for Best Radio Drama. Two operas were based on the play, which Orson Welles called “the greatest single radio script ever written”.

Fletcher adapted the first part of the Emily Brontë novel Wuthering Heights into a libretto for Bernard Herrmann’s opera of the same name, conceived in 1943. He completed the opera in June 1951, by which time they had divorced. Fletcher said the opera was “perhaps the closest to his talent and heart.” The work was never produced on stage during Herrmann’s lifetime.

Sorry, Wrong Number, by Lucille Fletcher (Playing time: 20:21)

(An invalid woman overhears plans for a desperate crime.)

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