Tom Stoppard, Oscar- and Tony-winning writer, dead at 88
British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, a playful, probing dramatist who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s Shakespeare In Love, has died. He was 88.In a statement on Saturday, United Agents said Stoppard died “peacefully” at his home in Dorset in southern England, surrounded by his family.“He will be remembered for his works, for their brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language,” the talent agency said. “It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him."The Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was garlanded with honours, including a shelf full of theatre awards.Tributes flowed in after news of his death, including from Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, who described Stoppard as his favourite playwright.Stoppard, left, with his first wife, Jose Ingle, at their home in March 1967. (Erich Auerbach/Getty Images)"He leaves us with a majestic body of intellectual and amusing work," Jagger wrote on social media platform X alongside three photos.Theatres in London's West End will dim their lights for two minutes at 7 p.m. local time on Tuesday in recognition of Stoppard.Over a career that spanned six decades, Stoppard's brain-teasing plays for theatre, radio and screen ranged from Shakespeare and science to philosophy and the historic tragedies of the 20th century.Five of them won Tony Awards for best play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968; Travesties in 1976; The Real Thing in 1984; The Coast of Utopia in 2007; and Leopoldstadt in 2023.Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was their "mixture of language, knowledge and feeling. It's those three things in gear together which make him so remarkable."'Put on Englishness like a coat'The writer was born Tomáš Sträussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlin in what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. His father was a doctor for the Bata shoe company, and when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939, the family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory.In late 1941, as Japanese forces closed in on the city state, Tomáš, his brother and their mother fled again, this time to India. His father stayed behind and later died when his ship was attacked as he tried to leave Singapore.In 1946, his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to threadbare postwar Britain. The eight-year-old Tom "put on Englishness like a coat," he later said, growing up to be a quintessential Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare.He didn't go to university but began his career, at the age of 17, as a journalist at newspapers in Bristol, southwest England, and then as a theatre critic for Scene magazine in London.Prolific careerStoppard wrote plays for radio and television, including A Walk on the Water, televised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which reimagined Shakespeare's Hamlet from the viewpoint of two hapless minor characters. A mix of tragedy and absurdist humour, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was staged at Britain's National Theatre, then run by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway in New York.A stream of exuberant, innovative plays followed, including meta-whodunnit The Real Inspector Hound (first staged in 1968); Jumpers (1972), a blend of physical and philosophical gymnastics; and Travesties (1974), which set intellectuals — including James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin — colliding in Zurich during the First World War.Musical drama Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) was a collaboration with composer André Previn about a Soviet dissident confined to a mental institution — part of Stoppard's long involvement with groups advocating for human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.Stoppard at an awards event in London in January 1973. (D. Morrison/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)Stoppard often played with time and structure. The Real Thing (1982) was a poignant romantic comedy about love and deception that featured plays within a play, while Arcadia (1993) moved between the modern era and the early 19th century, where characters at an English country house debated poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate had its way with them.The Invention of Love (1997) explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of English poet A.E. Housman.Stoppard began the 21st century with The Coast of Utopia (2002), an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, and he drew on his own background for Rock'n'Roll (2006), which contrasted the fates of the 1960s counterculture in Britain and in communist Czechoslovakia.The Hard Problem (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the lenses of science and religion.Stoppard was a strong champion of free speech who worked with organizations including PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed not to have strong political views otherwise, writing in 1968: "I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really."Some critics found his plays more clever than emotionally engaging. But biographer Lee said many of his plays contained a "sense of underlying grief."Actor Glenn Close presents Stoppard with an award in New York in May 2015. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images)"People in his plays ... history comes at them," Lee said at a British Library event in 2021. "They turn up, they don't know why they're there, they don't know whether they can get home again. They're often in exile, they can barely remember their own name. They may have been wrongfully incarcerated. They may have some terrible moral dilemma they don't know how to solve. They may have lost someone. And over and over again I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny, witty plays."That was especially true of Stoppard's late play Leopoldstadt, which drew on his own family's story for the tale of a Jewish Viennese family over the first half of the 20th century. He said he began thinking of his personal link to the Holocaust quite late in life, only discovering after his mother's death in 1996 that many members of his family, including all four grandparents, had died in concentration camps."I wouldn't have written about my heritage — that's the word for it nowadays — while my mother was alive, because she'd always avoided getting into it herself," Stoppard told the New Yorker in 2022."It would be misleading to see me as somebody who blithely and innocently, at the age of 40-something, thought, 'Oh, my goodness, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family,'" he said "Of course I knew, but I didn't know who they were. And I didn't feel I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn't really true."Leopoldstadt premiered in London at the start of 2020 to rave reviews, but weeks later, all theatres were shut by the COVID-19 pandemic. It eventually opened on Broadway in late 2022, going on to win four Tonys.Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard also wrote many radio plays, a novel, television series, including Parade's End (2013), and many film screenplays. These included dystopian Terry Gilliam comedy Brazil (1985); Steven Spielberg-directed war drama Empire of the Sun (1987); Elizabethan romcom Shakespeare in Love (1998) — for which he and Marc Norman shared a best adapted screenplay Oscar; code-breaking thriller Enigma (2001); and Russian epic Anna Karenina (2012).Stoppard is shown with American actors Mia, right, and Tisa Farrow at the opening of a stage production of the musical The Good Companions, in London in July 1974. (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)Stoppard also wrote and directed a 1990 film adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and translated numerous works into English, including plays by dissident Czech writer Vaclav Havel, who became the country's first post-communist president.He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1997 for his services to literature.Stoppard was married three times: to Jose Ingle, Miriam Stern — better known as the health journalist Dr. Miriam Stoppard — and TV producer Sabrina Guinness. The first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by four children, including actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.
