London. — British playwright Tom Stoppard, a playful and insightful playwright who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of “Shakespeare In Love” in 1998, has died. He was 88 years old.
In a statement on Saturday, United Agents said that Stoppard, born in the Czech Republic and often hailed as the best British playwright of his generation, died “peacefully” at his home in Dorset, in the southwest of England, surrounded by his family.
“He will be remembered for his works, for his brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his deep love for the English language,” they said. “It was an honor to work with Tom and to know him.”
The Rolling Stones leader, Mick Jagger, was among those who paid tribute and called Stoppard “a giant of English theater, very intellectual and very funny in all his plays and screenplays”.
“He possessed a dazzling wit and loved classical and popular music equally, something that often appeared in his vast work,” said Jagger, who produced the 2001 film “Enigma,” with a script by Stoppard. “He was funny and discreetly sardonic. A friend and companion, and I will always miss him.”
King Charles III said that Stoppard was “a dear friend who wore his genius lightly.”
London’s West End theaters will dim their lights for two minutes on Tuesday in tribute.
Plays That Stimulate the Brain
Throughout a career spanning six decades, Stoppard’s stimulating works for theater, radio, and film encompassed everything from Shakespeare and science to philosophy and the historical 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’s biographer, Hermione Lee, said that the secret of his works was his “mixture of language, knowledge and feeling… It’s those three things in tune that make him so extraordinary.”
The writer was born as Tomáš Sträussler in 1937, into a Jewish family from Zlín, in what was then Czechoslovakia, today the Czech Republic. His father was a doctor for the Bata shoe company, and when Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1939, the family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory.
In late 1941, as Japanese forces approached the city-state, Tomás, his brother, and his mother fled again, this time to India. His father stayed and died later when his ship was attacked while trying to leave Singapore.
In 1946, his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to the neglected post-war Britain. Tom, 8 years old, “dressed as English as a coat,” he would later say, and grew up to become an Englishman par excellence, a lover of cricket and Shakespeare.
He didn’t go to university, but he began his career, at 17, as a journalist in Bristol newspapers, in the southwest of England, and then as a theater critic for the magazine Scene in London.
Tragedy and Humor
He wrote works for radio and television, including “A Walk on the Waters”, televised in 1963, and made the leap to the stage with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, which reimagined Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the perspective of two hapless supporting characters. A mixture of tragedy and absurd humor, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was performed at the National Theatre of Great Britain, then directed by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.
He followed a series of exuberant and innovative works, including the meta-detective novel “The Real Inspector Hound” (first performed in 1968); “Jumpers” (1972), a mix of physical and philosophical gymnastics, and “Travesties” (1974), which placed intellectuals such as James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin in a confrontation in Zurich during World War I.
The musical drama “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” (1977) was a collaboration with composer Andre Previn about a Soviet dissident confined in a mental institution, part of Stoppard’s long involvement with groups advocating for human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
He often played with time and structure. “The Real Thing” (1982) was a moving romantic comedy about love and deception, with plays within plays, while “Arcadia” (1993) moved between the modern era and the early 19th century, where the characters in an English country house debated poetry, gardening, and chaos theory while fate dominated them.
“The Invention of Love” (1997) explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of the English poet AE Housman.
Stoppard began the 21st century with “The Coast of Utopia” (2002), an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, and drew on his own experience for “Rock ‘n’ Roll” (2006), which contrasted the fates of the counterculture of the 1960s in Great Britain and communist Czechoslovakia.
“The Hard Problem” (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the lenses of science and religion.
Defender of Freedom of Expression
Stoppard was a staunch defender of freedom of expression and collaborated with organizations such as PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed to have no firm political opinions, and in 1968 he wrote: “I burn without cause. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves to write, really.”
Some critics considered his works to be more witty than emotional. But biographer Lee stated that his “very funny and witty works” contained a “sense of latent pain”.
“The people who appear in his works… history attacks them,” Lee said at a British Library event in 2021. “They appear, they don’t know why they are there, they don’t know if they will be able to go home.”
This was especially true in his late work “Leopoldstadt”, which was inspired by the story of his own family to narrate the story of a Viennese Jewish family during the first half of the 20th century. Stoppard stated that he began to reflect on his personal connection to the Holocaust quite late in his life, and that he only discovered, after the death of his mother in 1996, that many members of his family, including his four grandparents, had died in concentration camps.
“It would be misleading to see me as someone who, with innocence and carelessness, in their forties, thought: ‘My God! I had no idea I belonged to a Jewish family,'” they declared to The New Yorker in 2022. “Of course I knew, but I didn’t know who they were. And I didn’t feel the need to find out to live my own life. But that wasn’t entirely true.”
“Leopoldstadt” premiered in London in early 2020 to excellent reviews; weeks later, all theaters closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It finally premiered on Broadway in late 2022 and won four Tony Awards.
From a prolific production, Stoppard also wrote numerous radio plays, a novel, television series such as “Parade’s End” (2013) and numerous film scripts. These include Terry Gilliam’s dystopian comedy “Brazil” (1985), the war drama directed by Steven Spielberg “Empire of the Sun” (1987), the Elizabethan romantic comedy “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) —for which he shared the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with Marc Norman—, the code-breaking thriller “Enigma” and the Russian epic “Anna Karenina” (2012).
He also wrote and directed a 1990 film adaptation of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and translated numerous works into English, including works by the dissident Czech writer Václav Havel, who became the country’s first post-communist president.
Stoppard also had a parallel activity as a Hollywood screenwriter, adding brilliance to the dialogues of films such as “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and the Star Wars film “Revenge of the Sith”.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his services to literature.
He married three times: to José Ingle, Miriam Stern —better known as health 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.
