For a man best known for his pregnant pauses, Harold Pinter has never been afraid to speak his mind.

Britain's greatest playwright of the past half-century, who was today awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, has traversed the worlds of cinema and stage, producing 29 plays and working as well as an actor, poet and director.

But he is almost as well known for his uncompromising political beliefs. He turned down an offer of a knighthood from the fomer Prime Minister, John Major, and has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, calling Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" and President Bush a "mass murderer".

In 1985 he travelled to Turkey with the American playwright Arthur Miller but was thrown out of a US embassy function honouring his colleague when he spoke of people having an electric current applied to their genitals. Pinter's experience of oppression in Turkey and the suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language.

Pinter's first play, The Room, contained many of the elements that have characterised his later works - namely a commonplace situation gradually invested with menace and mystery through the deliberate omission of an explanation or motivation for the action. It was, although the word did not yet exist, genuinely Pinteresque.

He is probably best known for his absurdist masterpieces The Caretaker, The Homecoming and Betrayal. He also co-wrote the screenplays for Accident and The Servant, two classics of British cinema.

Pinter was born in Hackney in 1930, the only son of immigrant Jews who ran a tailor’s and dressmaker's shop in Stoke Newington, North London.

The idyll of his childhood was interrupted by the outbreak of the war in 1939 when he was evacuated from his Hackney home to rural Cornwall. The separation from his loving parents, while traumatic, proved another source for his active imagination and introspection.

He was 14 before he returned to London by which point he had developed a love of the works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. His first love was acting and after appearing in several school productions at Hackney Downs Grammar, he accepted a grant to study at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

But his heart was not in his studies and two years later he left the prestigious college. Demonstrating his refusal to conform he was fined by magistrates in 1949 for refusing to complete his National Service.

Expressing his relief he said: "I could have gone to prison - I took my toothbrush to the trials - but it so happened that the magistrate was slightly sympathetic, so I was fined instead."

By 1950 Pinter had begun to publish poetry, under the name Harold Pinta, but continued to appear on the stage in repertory theatre until 1957. It was during this period that the frustrated Pinter began to write for the stage and The Room was published in 1957.

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