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British playwright Tom Stoppard, a playful, probing dramatist who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s «Shakespeare In Love», has died. He was 88.
In a statement 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 works, for their brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language», they said. «»It was an honor to work with Tom and to know him.»
The Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was garlanded with honors, including a shelf full of theater gongs.
His brain-teasing plays ranged across Shakespeare, science, philosophy and the historic 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 biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was their «mixture of language, knowledge and feeling. . It’s those three things in gear together which make him so remarkable.»
The writer was born Tomás Sträussler in 1937 to 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 forces closed in on the city, Tomas, his brother and their mother fled again, this time to India. His father stayed behind and later died when his ship was attacked as he tried to leave Singapore.
In 1946 his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to threadbare postwar Britain. The 8-year-old Tom «put on Englishness like a coat», he later said, growing up to be a quintessential Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare.
He did not go to university but began his career, aged 17, as a journalist on newspapers in Bristol, southwest England, and then as a theater critic for Scene magazine in London.
He wrote plays for radio and television including «A Walk on the Water», televised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with «Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead», which reimagined Shakespeare’s «Hamlet» from the viewpoint of two hapless minor characters. A mix of tragedy and absurdist humor, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was staged at Britain’s National Theatre, then run by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.
