Harold Pinter, shown here in 2005, was buried Wednesday in Kensal Green Cemetery in London. (Max Nast/Associated Press)

Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter was buried Wednesday in London, England, after a private funeral service he carefully planned.

Pinter died on Christmas Eve at age 78 after a long battle with colon cancer.

About 50 mourners, including Pinter's widow, biographer Antonia Fraser, and playwright Tom Stoppard, gathered at Kensal Green Cemetery.

Pinter's only son, Daniel Brand, was absent, the London Telegraph reported. The newspaper said Brand, 50, never forgave his father for leaving his mother, Vivien Merchant, for Fraser in the 1970s. Merchant died in 1982 at age 53.

No religious cleric officiated at the 15-minute ceremony, and there were no prayers. Instead, mourners listened to a number of readings and poems that had been chosen by Pinter to mark his passing.

Actor Michael Gambon began the readings with a passage from Pinter's play No Man's Land. Pinter had asked him three months ago to read the excerpt at his funeral service.

Last Friday, following the performance of No Man's Land at the Duke of York Theatre in London, the first performance of a Pinter play after the writer's death, Gambon read the lines to the audience, many of whom were moved to tears.

Mourners invited for drinks

At the graveside service, actor Matthew Burton read the poem At Lord's by Francis Thompson at Pinter's request.

There were no eulogies, and at the end of the service Fraser invited the mourners to join her for a drink.

On Tuesday in New York, Broadway theatres dimmed their lights at 7 p.m. for one minute in honour of Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

In total, he wrote 32 plays, one novel and 22 screenplays. His first play, The Room, was staged in 1957.

In recent years, he was a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and called the 2003 U.S.-led invasion a "bandit act" that showed "absolute contempt for the concept of international law."

Pinter's agent, Judy Daish, said a memorial event will be held sometime this year.