LONDON (AP) — British playwright Tom Stoppard, the playful and accomplished playwright who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for the 1998 film “Shakespeare in Love,” has died. He was 88.
United Agents said in a statement Saturday that Stoppard died “peacefully” at his home in Dorset in southern England, surrounded by his family.
“He will be remembered for his work, for its brilliance and humanity, but also for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his deep love of the English language,” they said. “It was an honor to work with and know Tom.”
Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was crowned with garlands of honours, including a shelf full of theater gongs.
His mind-bending plays span themes from Shakespeare, science, philosophy and 20th century historical tragedies. Five of them won the Tony Award for Best Play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968; “Travesties” 1976; “The Real Thing” 1984; “The Shore of Utopia” 2007; and Leopoldstadt in 2023.
Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was “a mixture of language, knowledge and feeling… It is these three things combined that make him so remarkable.”
The writer was born Thomas Ströussler in 1937 into a Jewish family in Zlín 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 troops closed in on the city, Thomas, his brother and their mother fled again, this time to India. His father stayed behind and later died when his ship was attacked while trying to leave Singapore.
In 1946, his mother married English officer Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to dilapidated post-war Britain. Eight-year-old Tom “put on his Englishness like a coat,” as he later said, and grew up to be a typical Englishman, loving cricket and Shakespeare.
He did not go to university, but began his career at the age of 17 as a newspaper journalist in Bristol, south-west England, and then as a theater critic for Scene magazine in London.
He wrote plays for radio and television, including Walk on Water, televised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which reimagined Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point of view of two hapless minor characters. A mixture of tragedy and absurdist humor, the play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966 and was staged at the British National Theatre, then directed by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.
A stream of vibrant, innovative plays followed, including the meta-mystery The Real Dog Inspector (first produced in 1968); The Jumpers (1972), a mixture of physical and philosophical gymnastics, and Travesties (1974), in which intellectuals including James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin clashed in Zurich during the First World War.
Every Good Boy Deserves a Favor (1977), a musical drama made in collaboration with composer André Previn, about a Soviet dissident committed to a mental hospital, was part of Stoppard's long collaboration with human rights groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
He often played with time and structure. The Real Thing (1982) was a poignant romantic comedy about love and deception that incorporated plays into the play, while Arcadia (1993) moved between the modern era and the early 19th century, with characters in an English country house discussing poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate had decreed for them.
The Invention of Love (1997) explores classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of English poet A.E. Housman.
Stoppard began the 21st century with an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, Coast of Utopia (2002), and drew on his own experiences in Rock 'n' Roll (2006), which contrasted the fortunes of the 1960s counterculture in Britain and communist Czechoslovakia.
The Hard Problem (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the lenses of science and religion.
Stoppard was a strong advocate of free speech and worked with organizations such as PEN and Index on Censorship. Otherwise he maintained that he had no strong political views, writing in 1968: “I burn without any reason. I cannot say that I write for any social purpose. You write because you really love to write.”
Some critics found his plays to be more clever than emotionally gripping. But Lee's biographer said many of his plays contained “a sense of profound grief.”
“The people in his plays… the story comes to them,” Lee said at a 2021 British Library event. “They show up, they don't know why they're here, they don't know if they can go home again. They're often in exile, they can barely remember their name. They may have been wrongly imprisoned. They may have some terrible moral dilemma that they don't know how to solve. They may lose someone. And again and again, I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny and witty plays.”
This is especially true of his later play Leopoldstadt, which was based on his own family history, telling the story of a Jewish Viennese family in the first half of the 20th century. Stoppard said he began to think about his personal connection to the Holocaust quite late, only after his mother's death in 1996 did he discover 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 what it’s called now—while my mother was alive, because she always avoided getting into it herself,” Stoppard told The New Yorker in 2022.
“It would be misleading to see me as someone who, blithely and innocently, at the age of 40, kind of thought, 'Oh my God, I had no idea I was part of a Jewish family,'” he said. “Of course I did, but I didn't know who they were. And I didn't feel like I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn't quite true.”
Leopoldstadt premiered in London in early 2020 to rave reviews; a few weeks later, all movie theaters were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It opened on Broadway in late 2022 and won four Tony Awards.
Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard has also written numerous radio plays, a novel, a television series, including Parade's End (2013), and numerous film scripts. These included Terry Gilliam's dystopian comedy Brazil (1985), Steven Spielberg's war drama Empire of the Sun (1987), the Elizabethan rom-com Shakespeare in Love (1998), for which he and Mark Norman shared a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, the thriller Riddle (2001) and the Russian epic Anna Karenina. (2012).
He also wrote and directed the 1990 film adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and translated numerous works into English, including plays by the Czech dissident writer Vaclav Havel, who became the country's first post-communist president.
In 1997, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for services to literature.
He was married three times: to Jose Ingle, Miriam Stern, better known as medical journalist Dr. Miriam Stoppard, and television producer Sabrina Guinness. The first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by four children, including actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.
