British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard is a playful and accomplished playwright who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for the 1998 film. Shakespeare in Lovedied. He was 88.
In a statement released 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 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,” the talent agency said. “It was an honor to work with and know Tom.”
Czech-born Stoppard has often been hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation, and has been crowned with accolades, including a regiment of theater awards.
Following the news of his death, tributes poured in, including from the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger, who called Stoppard his favorite playwright.
“He left us a majestic, intelligent and funny work,” Jagger wrote on social media site X, along with three photos.
On Tuesday at 19:00 local time, theaters in London's West End will dim their lights for two minutes in recognition of Stoppard.
In a career spanning six decades, Stoppard created cerebral plays for the theater, radio and screen, from Shakespeare and science to philosophy and historical tragedies of the 20th century.
Five of them received the Tony Award for Best Play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in 1968; Travesties in 1976; The real thing in 1984; Coast of Utopia in 2007; And Leopoldstadt in 2023.
Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was “a mixture of language, knowledge and feeling. It's those three things combined that make it so great.”
“Put on your Englishness like a coat”
The writer was born Tomas 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.
At the end of 1941, when Japanese troops surrounded the city-state, Tomas, 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 journalist for newspapers in Bristol, south-west England, and then as a theater critic for Scene magazine in London.
Fruitful career
Stoppard wrote plays for radio and television, including Walk on watertelevised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are deadwho reinterpreted Shakespeare. Hamlet from the point of view of two hapless supporting 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 in New York.
A stream of colorful, innovative plays followed, including meta-detectives. A real inspector dog (first production 1968); 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.
Musical drama Every good boy deserves some favor (1977) was a collaboration with composer André Previn about a Soviet dissident committed to a mental hospital, part of Stoppard's long collaboration with human rights groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Stoppard often played with time and structure. The real thing (1982) was a poignant romantic comedy about love and deception, in which plays were included in the play, and Arcadia (1993) moves between the modern era and the early 19th century, where characters in an English country house discussed poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate had decreed for them.
The invention of love (1997) explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart using the life of the English poet A. E. Housman as an example.
Stoppard began the 21st century with Coast of Utopia (2002), an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, and he drew on his own experiences for Rock and roll (2006), which compared the fortunes of 1960s counterculture in Britain and communist Czechoslovakia.
Complex problem (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the prism of science and religion.
Stoppard was a strong advocate of free speech and worked with organizations such as PEN and Index on Censorship. 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.”
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 are often in exile, they can barely remember their name. They may have been unjustly imprisoned. They may have some terrible moral dilemma that they don't know how to solve. the sense of loss and longing in these very funny and witty plays.”
This is especially true of Stoppard's late game. Leopoldstadtbased on the history of his own family, in the story of a Jewish Viennese family in the first half of the 20th century. He said he began to think about his personal connection to the Holocaust quite late in life and only discovered 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 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 The film premiered in London in early 2020 to rave reviews, but a few weeks later all cinemas 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, and a television series, including End of the parade (2013) and many film scripts. These included Terry Gilliam's dystopian comedy. Brazil (1985); War drama by Steven Spielberg Empire of the Sun (1987); Elizabethan rom-com Shakespeare in Love (1998) – for which he and Mark Norman won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay; detective thriller Enigma (2001); and Russian epic Anna Karenina (2012).
Stoppard also wrote and directed the 1990 film adaptation 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 knighted him for services to literature.
Stoppard 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.
