British playwright Tom Stoppard, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, has died. He was 88.
United's agents said on 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. It was an honor to work with and know Tom,” the statement said.
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“My wife and I are deeply saddened to learn of the death of one of our greatest writers, Sir Tom Stoppard,” King Charles said in a statement. “A dear friend who made light of his genius, he could and did turn his pen to any topic, challenging, exciting and inspiring his audience born from his personal story. We express our most sincere condolences to his beloved family. Let us all take comfort in his immortal phrase: “See every exit as an entrance to another place.”
Stoppard was born in the Czech Republic in 1937. His family fled to Singapore after Nazi Germany invaded in 1939. He, his brother and their mother fled again when Japanese troops approached the city in 1941. His father died trying to leave the city. His mother married an English officer in 1946 and the family moved to 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.
Stoppard first worked as a journalist before turning to theater in the 1960s. Stoppard was often called 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.
He wrote plays for radio and television, including Walk on Water, televised in 1963, and had his stage breakthrough with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which reimagined Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point of view of two hapless minor characters.
Stoppard was a strong advocate of free speech and worked with organizations such as PEN and Censorship Index. He otherwise claimed to have no strong political views, writing in 1968: “I burn without any reason. I cannot say that I write for any social purpose. A person writes because he really loves to write.”
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.
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 continued. win four Tonys.
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).
In 1997, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for services to literature.
