Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, had been suffering from cancer, and died on Wednesday, with a small private funeral and memorial service to be held at a date to be announced.

At a staging of one of his plays in London's West End, the first such performance since his death, the stars of the drama hailed Pinter as 'one of the greatest literary figures of all time' and read aloud an address to be repeated at his funeral.

'He was a great, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten,' his wife Lady Antonia Fraser told the Guardian newspaper, while his agent told AFP he had died of cancer.

After an emotional performance of No Man's Land, one of the play's stars David Bradley told the sold-out theatre: 'We have lost one of the greatest literary figures of all time. His loss is monumental and his influence cannot be calculated.

'He is often associated with menace and the dark side but could also be very funny and moving... As long as we have actors and theatre he will be performed forever.'

Following Bradley's address to the audience, co-star Michael Gambon read out the address, part of which said: 'Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion trapped. Bow to it.

'It will assuredly never release them, but who knows what relief it may give to them, who knows how they may quicken in their chains, in their glass jars?'

Pinter's best-known 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'.

'A life-long campaigner for free speech and an uncompromising opponent of the Iraq war ... he lived just long enough to hear the Prime Minister (Gordon Brown) announce the final withdrawal of British troops from Iraq,' the Independent daily said of Pinter.

Mr Brown announced last week that British troops would leave Iraq by the middle of next year.

'These were among the many sub-plots in a life's drama that took him on an eventful personal journey from the east end of London to its West End - a drama on which the curtain has now, sadly, fallen for the last time,' the Independent said.

Leading figures from the arts world, as well as political leaders from around the globe, paid tribute to Pinter.

Italian playwright Dario Fo, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, paid tribute to Pinter's 'extraordinary humanity' on Friday.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed Pinter as 'a great dramatist and perceptive humanist who was uncompromising and intransigent'. 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'.

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'.

In Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech, he launched a lengthy 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