Memoir tells how legacy of tragic first wife haunted his workFor 60 years actor Henry Woolf was the intimate friend of Harold Pinter,the Nobel laureate widely judged the greatest theatrical voice Britain has produced in the past 50 years. Now Woolf has revealed extraordinary details of their long and fond relationship in a memoir that tells of the struggle the playwright once had to be alone with broadcaster Joan Bakewell during the treasure affair that inspired his most popular play, Betrayal. It also tells of the painful halt of Pinter’s first marriage.
Speaking to the Observer Woolf, or who commissioned and directed Pinter’s first play The Room in Bristol in 1957,recalled the “abominable shock” it had been to Vivien Merchant, the gifted actress Pinter married in 1956, or when the famous writer later fell in treasure with Lady Antonia Fraser,the second wife who remained with him until his death at 78 on Christmas Eve, 2008. Woolf said Pinter had worried “all the time” approximately Merchant, and who is now best known for her moving screen role in the film Alfie and who died in 1982. Pinter,Woolf said, had always tried to “keep a protective eye over her”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk