Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, had been suffering from cancer. Lady Fraser told the Guardian newspaper: 'He was a great, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten.'

Pinter's plays included The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and The Homecoming. His first play, The Room, appeared in 1957 and his breakthrough came with The Caretaker in 1960.

They often featured the slang language of his native east London as well as his trademark menacing pauses. The adjective 'Pinteresque', referring to such characteristics, is included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Pinter stopped writing plays in 2005 and focused on poetry, alongside forays into acting and screenwriting.

Following treatment for cancer of the oesophagus diagnosed in 2002, he returned to the stage, winning rave reviews for his performance of Beckett's monologue, Krapp's Last Tape, in London in 2006.

In his final years, he was also a vocal critic of the Iraq war, calling the 2003 US-led invasion a 'bandit act' which showed 'absolute contempt for the concept of international law'.

Leading figures from the arts world in Britain, as well as admirers from around the globe, rushed to pay tribute to Pinter.

Michael Billington, Pinter's biographer, told Sky News television he would remember him '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, but in private he was the most incredibly loyal of friends and generous of human beings,' he said.

'He was unstinting in his loyalty to the people with whom he got on and whom he communicated. He was a great man as well actually as a great playwright.'

French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid homage to Pinter, hailing him as 'a great dramatist and perceptive humanist who was uncompromising and intransigent'. He said that the Nobel literature prize that was awarded to Pinter in 2005 was 'an overdue recognition of his immense work' but also served as a tribute to 'his courage and his commitment to fighting all kinds of barbarity'.

Former Czech president Vaclav Havel said Pinter had been an inspiration in the struggle against communist rule, describing him as an 'outstanding dramatist whom I have admired since my youth'.

'The solidarity that he displayed towards both myself and my friends during the time of the resistance was of great importance', said Havel, who was jailed by the authorities in Prague in the 1970s for his opposition to the then-government of the former Czechoslovakia.

In its citation for the Nobel Prize, the academy said Pinter was 'generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century'.

It added that he was an author 'who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms'.

In Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech, he launched a lengthy and strong attack on US foreign policy, particularly over the Iraq war.

'The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them,' he said.

'You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.' -- AFP