LONDON (AP) — British playwright Tom Stoppard, a playful and inquisitive playwright who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of 1998’s “Shakespeare In Love,” has died. He was 88 years old.
In a statement on Saturday, United Agents said Stoppard died “peacefully” at his home in Dorset, southern 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 of the English language,” they said. “It was an honor to work with Tom and get to know him.”
Born in the Czech Republic, Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was awarded honors, including a shelf full of theater gongs.
His thought-provoking works spanned Shakespeare, science, 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; “Transvestites” in 1976; “The Real” 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 is those three things together that 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 approached the city, Tomas, his brother and mother fled again, this time to India. His father was left behind and later died when his ship was attacked while trying to leave Singapore.
In 1946, her mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to threadbare postwar Britain. Eight-year-old Tom “put on English like a coat,” he later said, and grew 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 for newspapers in Bristol, south-west England, and then as a theater critic for Scene magazine in London.
He wrote plays for radio and television, including “A Walk on Water,” televised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which reimagined Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the point of view of two hapless supporting characters. A mix of tragedy and absurd humor, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was performed at Britain’s National Theatre, then directed by Laurence Olivier, before transferring to Broadway.
A series of exuberant and innovative works followed, including the detective novel “The Real Inspector Hound” (first staged in 1968); “Jumpers” (1972), a mix of physical and philosophical gymnastics, and “Travesties” (1974), which confronts intellectuals such as James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin in Zurich during the First World War.
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 that featured plays within a play, while “Arcadia” (1993) moved between the modern era and the early 19th century, where characters in an English country house debated poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate had its way.
“The Invention of Love” (1997) explored classic literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of 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 background for “Rock’n’roll” (2006), which contrasted 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 was a strong supporter of freedom of expression and worked with organizations such as PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed to have no strong political opinions otherwise, writing in 1968: “I burn without causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one really loves to write.”
Some critics found his works more intelligent than emotionally engaging. But biographer Lee said many of his works contained an “underlying sense of pain.”
“The people in his works… the story comes to them,” Lee said at a British Library event in 2021. “They turn up, they don’t know why they’re there, they don’t know if they’ll be able to get home. They’re often in exile, they barely remember their own name. They may have been wrongfully imprisoned. They may have some terrible moral dilemma that they don’t know how to resolve. They may have lost someone. And I think over and over again you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny works. ingenious.”
This was especially true in his last work “Leopoldstadt,” which drew on his own family history to tell the story of a Viennese Jewish family during the first half of the 20th century. Stoppard said he began thinking about his personal connection to the Holocaust quite late in his life, and only discovered after his mother’s death in 1996 that many members of his family, including his four grandparents, had died in concentration camps.
“I wouldn’t have written about my heritage (that’s the word for it today) while my mother was alive, because she had always avoided entering into it,” Stoppard told The New Yorker in 2022.
“It would be misleading to see myself as someone who joyfully and innocently, at the age of 40-something, thought, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family,’” he said. “Of course I knew, 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 really true.”
“Leopoldstadt” premiered in London in early 2020 to rave reviews; Weeks later, all cinemas were closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It finally premiered on Broadway in late 2022 and won four Tony Awards.
Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard also wrote many radio plays, a novel, television series such as “Parade’s End” (2013) and many film scripts. These included Terry Gilliam’s dystopian comedy “Brazil” (1985), the Steven Spielberg-directed war drama “Empire of the Sun” (1987), the Elizabethan romantic comedy “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), for which he and Marc Norman shared an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, the deciphering 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 numerous works into English, including works by dissident Czech writer Václav Havel, who became the country’s first post-communist president.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his services to literature.
He was 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. She is survived by four children, including actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.
