The tributes for Harold Pinter yesterday said as much about his reputation as a kind and generous man as they did about his status as one of the world’s great playwrights.

Michael Billington, Pinter’s biographer and friend, said that he had been devastated by the news of his death – but would remember the writer “above all as a man of generosity”.

“Harold was a political figure, a polemicist, and carried on fierce battles against American foreign policy and often British foreign policy,” Billington said. “But in private he was the most incredibly loyal of friends and generous of human beings. He was unstinting in his loyalty to the people with whom he got on. He was a great man as well as a great playwright. Harold had been ill for a very long time, but he had a titanic will and one imagined he would go on fighting.”

There were warm tributes to Pinter from across public life. Alan Yentob, the Creative Director of the BBC, said: “He was a unique figure in British theatre. He has dominated the theatre scene since the 1950s.”

As a young man Pinter had been fined for refusing to complete his National Service. Years later he refused a knighthood from the Major Government, then stopped writing to campaign against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was an active supporter of human rights causes across the world. The former Cabinet minister Tony Benn said: “Harold Pinter was a great playwright and a great figure on the political scene.”

The actor David Bradley, who has been appearing in a production of Pinter’s No Man’s Land, said: “I am very honoured to have known him personally and professionally over the last ten years. People from Germany, Israel and China would come backstage saying Harold Pinter was so important to them. He wrote about oppression and people taking terrible advantage and oppressing each other on a personal level. Although he did not write the plays in an overtly political way they stood the test of time because they have universal themes. They meant so much to people in different ways.”

Bill Bailey, who appeared in the collection of sketchesPinter’s People, told Sky News: “He ushered in a whole new era of drama. It didn’t have to have a neat ending or even make sense; it conveyed an air of menace, and that inspired a new generation. As a comic, I was drawn to the brilliant way he was able to catch the idiosyncrasies of comic speech, and the ability to incorporate that into something that was drama. It was incredibly funny.”

The novelist and playwright Nigel Williams, who made a film about Pinter for the BBC’sArenaseries soon after cancer was diagnosed, told The Times that he remembered the playwright washing his medication down with chardonnay. “He had style,” he said. “For my money, he was the great postwar playwright, and I’m sure a lot of other writers feel the same. He had a revolutionary attitude towards dramatic language. His plays were the work of a master craftsman.

“He was an incredibly generous man,” Williams added. “I first met him after a staging of my first play, and I was in awe of him, but he sought me out to congratulate me; not many people would have done that.”

Benedict Nightingale, chief theatre critic of The Times, said that Pinter “wasn’t a man of brooding silences or raging rants, but genial, chatty, unpretentious, entertaining and happy to talk about anything from his own work to an impending Test series”.

Life and loves

— Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, in East London and educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Central School of Speech and Drama

— He married Vivien Merchant, an actress, in 1956. She divorced him in 1980 because of an affair with Lady Antonia Fraser, the author and daughter of Lord Longford, the antipornography campaigner. The couple’s relationship had begun in 1975. Merchant died subsequently of alcoholism, in 1982, and their son, Daniel, changed his name and became estranged from Pinter. From 1962 to 1969 Pinter also had an affair with the television presenter Joan Bakewell

— Key works: 29 plays including The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959) and Betrayal (1978). 21 screenplays including The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1980) and Betrayal (1983)

— Awards: CBE (1966), Laurence Olivier Special Award (1996), Bafta Fellowship (1997), Companion of Honour (2002), Nobel Prize for Literature (2005), Légion d’honneur (2007) and 17 honorary degrees

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