Among contemporary dramatists Harold Pinter holds a unique place. Few, if any, have so lastingly and so profoundly influenced fellow playwrights — not just in this country but also beyond. And none has been so garlanded with high honours. A CBE at 36, he was made a Companion of Honour in 2002 and, in 2005, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

His incomparable, highly charged writing had, throughout his career, been allied to and fed by his less celebrated work as an actor. Before he was 30, he had acted 100 or more roles in the hard slog of regional rep. These ranged from maniacal killer, policeman and bank manager, to Iago, John Worthing, Mr Rochester, Maxim de Winter in Rebecca and — intriguingly — Lancelot Spratt in Doctor in the House.

Later he was to act memorably in a number of his own plays, and in films. But it is out of his early acting experience that almost certainly grew his deep and probably intuitive understanding of how a few words can be made to resonate with a wealth of half-meanings and suggested meanings — of how to disturb, grip and amuse an audience and to challenge their perceptions. David Hare has written that Pinter never offers audiences “the easy handhold with which they might be able to take some simplified view of the events on stage”, and that “it is this willingness to say ‘take it or leave it’ which finally makes his work so inimitable”.

Actors, on their side, nearly always find his plays a joy to speak. Unlike many of his early critics, they have seldom considered them inaccessible or difficult. They relish the power the writing has to convey an air of hidden menace; they love, too, how it can raise from audiences sudden bursts of laughter, often by drawing on the traditions of the music hall: the shock of the jarringly unexpected; extreme vulgarity mixed with extreme gentility; the hilarious set-piece monologue.

In their precise composition Pinter’s scripts can, to some extent, resemble a music score. For example, and famously, they are punctuated throughout by the word “pause”, the specific duration of each shown by the number of dots following it on the page. These are there to indicate the length of the pause required of the actor at that point. (Later, Pinter wished he had been less didactic and, like David Mamet, simply used instead the word “beat”).

The son of a ladies’ tailor, Hyman (Jack) Pinter, and his wife Frances (née Mann), he was born in 1930 in Hackney, London, and spent his childhood in the tough environs of the East End. He believed his father’s family were originally Hungarian Jews, also of Portuguese blood which, he claimed, was the reason for his explosive personality.

Between 1943 and 1947 he attended Hackney Downs Grammar School where he set a school record by sprinting the 100 yards in 10.2 seconds, played Macbeth and Romeo, and was introduced by a beloved teacher, Joe Brearley, to the darkly psychological dramas of the Jacobean playwright, John Webster — surely a seminal influence. At Hackney Downs he also developed the passion for cricket which was to last all his life (for many years he actively chaired the Gaieties Cricket Club).

In 1948 he studied acting at RADA on an LCC grant, but disliked it there and left after two terms. In the same year he was called up for National Service but, hating the Cold War, declared himself a conscientious objector, conducting his own defence. Two tribunals refused his application and he was fined. He later said that had he been old enough he would, in the war, have accepted military service.

In the early Fifties a number of his poems were published; and it was now that he started to get work as an actor. Under the stage name David Baron, he toured Ireland with Anew McMaster’s company at £6 a week, “a golden age for me”, and appeared in Donald Wolfit’s renowned classical season in Hammersmith. His first play, The Room, a short piece written in four days, was presented in 1957 by Bristol University, and immediately afterwards by the Bristol Old Vic School as part of The Sunday Times student drama festival.

There followed some exceptionally fruitful years. First came the British stage premiere of two full-length plays, The Birthday Party (1958) and The Caretaker (1960), now acknowledged masterpieces. Notoriously, the daily papers reviled The Birthday Party at its opening, calling it hopelessly obscure. And though, several days later, Harold Hobson hailed it enthusiastically in The Sunday Times, the play had been withdrawn the day before after only a week. It had taken £260 11s 8d at the box office.

These years marked, as well, the first stage productions of many short works, a compressed form which, like poetry, Pinter often favoured. Among them are A Slight Ache, The Dumb Waiter, A Night Out, The Lover, The Dwarfs, Tea Party and the double-bill of Landscape and Silence, directed in 1969 for the RSC by Peter Hall.

Hall’s long working association and close friendship with Pinter had, in fact, begun in 1962 when they co-directed The Collection for the RSC, which Hall then ran. Hall went on to direct the premieres of four more of Pinter’s plays, all of them full length, all destined to become huge international successes: The Homecoming (1965), and Old Times (1971), both for the RSC, and No Man’s Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978) both for the National Theatre, of which Hall was by now director.