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Tom Stoppard, Oscar-winning playwright and screenwriter, dies at 88
Tom Stoppard the playwright and screenwriter of energetic, witty, intellectual, absurd, timeless works like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties and Leopoldstadt, has died at the age of 88.
Stoppard a writer of Shakespeare in Love, for which he shared the Oscar in 1998, passed away at his home in Dorset, England, in a peaceful manner, as per the information from his agency United Agents which conveyed the news of his death via a statement on X on Saturday, Nov. 29.
“The loss of Tom Stoppard, our beloved client and friend, is a great sorrow to us,” the statement read. “He will be remembered through his works, their brilliance and humanity, as well as for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his abiding love of the English language. We counted it a great privilege to work with and know Tom.”
King Charles pays tribute to “dear friend” Sir Tom Stoppard
In a sad news announcement, King Charles shared the very warm words the late Sir Tom Stoppard, was one of the most impressive and influential dramatists in the world. “My wife and I are profoundly shocked to hear of the loss of the extraordinary writer, Sir Tom Stoppard, whose passing leaves a void that can hardly be filled by anyone,” the King expressed.
“Dear friend who was a genius but modestly, he had the ability, and in fact he did, to apply his writing to any field, and thus questions, moves and even inspires, his audiences, being simply his own autobiographical nature. To his very dear ones we extend the deepest condolence from our hearts. May we all find solace in Stoppard’s immortal line: ‘Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.’ ”
Traversing the globe and making his mark on literature: the story of Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard was originally born as Thomas Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. After the outbreak of World War II, his family escaped to Singapore, and as he grew up, he found out that his four grandparents and three of his aunts had been killed in the Holocaust.
After the Japanese had taken over Singapore, Stoppard, his brother, and mother were sent off to India. His father died while imprisoned by the Japanese. His mother later married an English army major, who brought his stepsons to England, and Tom took his stepfather’s surname, becoming Tom Stoppard.
In an interview with PEOPLE in 1977, he said that he had no literary talent when he was a boy at a boarding school. “I found Shakespeare dull and even [the Charles Dickens novel] David Copperfield was a terrible slog,” he remembered. “Had I been run over by a bus at that time, I would have been one of the most ignorant corpses around.”
Tom Stoppard’s evolution from a novice journalist to a playwright of major success
Stoppard left the educational institution at 17 and, as per his own words while talking to PEOPLE, he chose to become “a great journalist” because he was “always thrilled to meet anybody known for anything at all.” He was engaged in various fields of journalism – a reporter, an auto columnist (although he was not familiar with the process of driving), a critic, a short‑story writer and a playwright who was in the process of building up but lacked success.
It was with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a ridiculous tragedy that dealt with the two insignificant characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that Stoppard made his initial breakthrough. The play was first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966 and then it was performed at London’s Old Vic in 1967, thus making him the youngest playwright then produced by the National Theatre. The show was later brought to Broadway, and hence, Stoppard was awarded his first Tony Award, for Best Play.
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Tom Stoppard on his success: “I just shed one skin and grew another”
When asked about his change of fate from a writer in a dire situation to a playwright widely praised, Stoppard said to PEOPLE: “There was no road to Damascus. I just shed one skin and grew another.”
He basically changed his persona a few times. Stoppard went on to write a series of successful plays over the years such as Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Arcadia, and Leopoldstadt, which he brought to Broadway in 2022, among others. Overall, he was nominated for a Tony eight times and won five times – the latest award, in 2023, was for Leopoldstadt.
Tom Stoppard on using his family’s history as a source for Leopoldstadt
Stoppard used his family’s history of the Second World War as a background for the play Leopoldstadt which is about a Viennese, not Czech, family. “It just felt like it was time for me, because of the age I got, I was born in 1937, to deal with my family’s history,” he explained to The Hollywood Reporter in 2023.
“At the same time, I could also say that it came into my mind as something I had an instinctive interest in doing. I had never thought before that my family history or my own history could be an idea for a play,” he said. “I had never even come close to the idea of writing a play that was just my own personal history and that I was connected, in a negative way, to the most significant event in European history in the 20th century.”
Tom Stoppard’s prolifient screen career: From Brazil to Shakespeare in Love
Tom Stoppard has also been a very busy and successful translator of numerous plays into English, mainly by Polish and Czech authors. Writing for the screen he was involved in different British TV shows and films from the 1960s. Among others he co-wrote the 1975 TV movie Three Men in a Boat, and his plays were also filmed and broadcasted.
In 1985 together with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, he co-wrote the dystopian drama Brazil which is often ranked among the best films of the United Kingdom. The three of them were nominated for an Oscar for their screenplay. Besides that, Stoppard penned the script for Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun, and he contributed to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989 without taking a credit. In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, he mentioned that script doctoring is a job he does once a year, approximately. “The second reason for doing it is that you get to work with people you admire,” he explained. “The first reason, of course, is that it’s overpaid.”
Writing Shakespeare in Love and Fiction about the Bard: Tom Stoppard
In 1998, Tom Stoppard received an Oscar for the romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love. He shared this award with his co-writer Marc Norman. Norman wrote the original screenplay — putting Shakespeare in a love story similar to Romeo and Juliet — and Stoppard was the one who did the subsequent drafts.
“What makes it easier for a person who is writing a fictional story about Shakespeare is the fact that there are very few signposts, very few facts that everyone agrees on and a lot of gaps that you can fill with your own invention,” Stoppard told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. “Some of the film is just playful. But on the other hand, you are using the most famous love story ever written as your vehicle, so there are lots of ways to work with it.”
Tom Stoppard’s later works, awards, and family life
In 2012, Stoppard penned the screenplay for Anna Karenina. He was also nominated for an Emmy award for his writing on the 2012 miniseries Parade’s End.
During the years 1965 to 1972, the playwright Stoppard was married to a nurse Josie Ingle. Together they had two sons, Oliver and Barnaby. The following year, he married doctor and author Miriam Stern and they also had four sons, Ed and Will; Ed became an actor. The couple Stoppard and Stern separated in 1992 and it was around this time that he started dating actress Felicity Kendal. Then in 2014, he married Sabrina Guinness.
Tom Stoppard on the “mystical” nature of writing and his hopes for posterity
Writing was always a mystical experience for Tom Stoppard. “All the good bits are subconscious — they truly are,” he said to The Spectator in 2019. “It’s very seldom that you actually sit down with a clear idea of what you have to put down on this page of paper. Far more often it is the case that the work itself comes to you as you are doing it, almost as if it is coming from the very act of writing.”
He also revealed that it was his hope that his plays would continue to be performed after his passing. “I write with posterity in mind,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind if my plays were done now and then, not just when they are brand new. I like the idea of them being around like the rest of the furniture.”
Stoppard left behind his wife and children.
