LONDON — British playwright Tom Stoppard, the funnyman and detective playwright who won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1998 film “Shakespeare in Love,” has died. He was 88.
United Agents said in a statement on Saturday that Stoppard died “peacefully” at his home in Dorset, southern England, surrounded by his family.
They said: “He will be remembered for his works, for their brilliance and humanity, for his wit, irreverence, generosity of spirit and profound love of the English language.” “It has been an honor to work with and get to know Tom.”
Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation, and was honored with a wreath of honours, including a rack full of theatrical gongs.
His mind-bending plays ranged from Shakespeare to science, philosophy, and twentieth-century historical tragedies. Five of them won Tony Awards for best play: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1968; “The Masquerade” 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 plays was “the combination of language, knowledge, and feeling. … It is these three things harmonious together that make him so special.”
Writer Thomas Straussler was born in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlin 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 approached the city, Thomas, 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 an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to Britain after the war. He later said that 8-year-old Tom “wore English like a coat”, and grew up to be a quintessential Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare.
He did not go to university, but began his career when he was seventeen, as a newspaper journalist in Bristol, southwest England, and then as a theater critic at Scene magazine in London.
He wrote plays for radio and television, including “Walking on Water,” which was televised in 1963, and had a theatrical breakthrough with “The Deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” which reimagined Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the point of view of two hapless young characters. A mixture of tragedy and absurdist humour, it premiered at the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and ran at Britain’s National Theatre, run by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.
A series of prolific and innovative plays followed, including “The Real Inspector Hound” (premiered in 1968); “Jumpers” (1972), a mixture of physical and philosophical gymnastics, and “Travesties” (1974), which pitted intellectuals including James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin against each other in Zurich during World War I.
The musical drama Every Good Boy Deserves a Favor (1977) was a collaboration with composer Andre Previn about a Soviet dissident detained in a mental institution – part of Stoppard’s long-standing involvement with human rights groups 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 and featured plays within a play, while Arcadia (1993) moved between modern times and the early 19th century, with characters in an English country house discussing poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate had its way with them.
The Invention of Love (1997) explored classic literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of English poet A.E. Houseman.
Stoppard began the 21st century with The Coast of Utopia (2002), an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, and drew on his own background for Rock and Roll (2006), which compared the fates of 1960s counterculture Britain and communist Czechoslovakia.
“The Hard Problem” (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the lenses of science and religion.
Stoppard has been a strong advocate for freedom of expression and has worked with organizations including PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed to have no strong political views otherwise, writing in 1968: “I burn for no reason. I cannot say that I write for any social purpose. One writes because one really loves writing.”
Some critics found his plays more intelligent than emotionally engaging. But Lee’s biographer said that many of his plays contained “a sense of underlying sadness.”
“The people in his plays… history is attacking them,” he told me at a British Library event in 2021. “They turn up, not knowing why they’re there, not knowing if they can ever get home again. They’re often in exile, they can barely remember their names. Maybe they’ve been wrongly imprisoned. Maybe they have some terrible moral dilemma they don’t know how to solve. Maybe they’ve lost someone. And again and again, I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these funny plays.” And very clever.”
This was especially true in his latest play, “Leopoldstadt,” which based his family story on the tale of a Jewish family from Vienna during the first half of the twentieth century. Stoppard said he began thinking about his personal connection to the Holocaust late in life, and it was not until after his mother’s death in 1996 that he discovered that several members of his family, including his four grandparents, had died in concentration camps.
“I would not have written about my heritage — that’s the word used nowadays — while my mother was alive, because she always avoided delving into it herself,” Stoppard told The New Yorker in 2022.
He said: “It would be misleading for them to see me as someone who happily and innocently said, at the age of 40, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family.’ “Of course I did, but I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t feel like I had to know that in order to live my life. But that wasn’t really true.”
“Leopoldstadt” premiered in London at the beginning of 2020 to rave reviews. Weeks later, all theaters were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It finally opened on Broadway in late 2022, winning four Tony Awards.
Astonishingly prolific, Stoppard has also written several radio plays, a novel, a television series including The End of the Show (2013), and several film screenplays. These films included the dystopian comedy “Brazil” (1985) directed by Terry Gilliam, the war drama “Empire of the Sun” (1987) directed by Steven Spielberg, the Elizabethan romantic comedy “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) – for which he and Mark Norman shared the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay – the thriller “Enigma” (2001) and the Russian epic “Anna Karenina.” (2012).
He also wrote and directed a 1990 film adaptation of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” and translated several works into English, including plays by Czech dissident writer Vaclav Havel, who became the country’s first post-communist president.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for services to literature.
He was married three times: to José Engel, Miriam Stern – known as health journalist Dr. Miriam Stoppard – and television producer Sabrina Guinness. The first two marriages ended in divorce. He leaves behind four sons, including actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.
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