According to the BBC, playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, who won four Tony Awards for the plays “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Travesties,” “The Real Thing,” and “On the Shores of Utopia,” and won an Oscar for his screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love,” has died. He was 88 years old.
“It is with great sadness that we announce that our beloved client and friend Tom Stoppard has passed away peacefully at his home in Dorset surrounded by his family,” United Agents told Sky News. “His work will be remembered for its brilliance and humanity, as well as its wit, irreverence, generosity of spirit and deep love of the English language.”
Stoppard, a master of words who fled Czechoslovakia as a child during Nazi rule and eventually settled in England, is perhaps best known for his clever wordplay. Writing for stage, film, and radio, he explored themes such as betrayal, politics, and identity, the last of which was heavily influenced by his own experiences of being part of two cultures. The adjective “Stopperdian” was coined to describe works that use wit and comedy to further deepen philosophical themes.
Stoppard entered the British theater scene in 1966 with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” a play about two supporting characters from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” However, Stoppard’s penchant for comedy and verbal gymnastics made him a target of critics early in his career, even though he was well-respected.
Critic Dennis Kennedy said, “Stoppard’s plays are sometimes dismissed as slick showmanship, lacking substance, social engagement, or emotional weight.”
It was not until later works, such as The Real Thing (1982) and Arcadia (1993), that Stoppard allowed himself to delve deeper into emotional depths and mix them, if not incorporate them, into his dazzling wordplay.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead received mixed reviews at the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but it was produced by the National Theater Company at the Old Vic and later on Broadway, winning Stoppard his first Tony Award for Best Picture in 1968. Stoppard also adapted the screenplay for the film of the same name, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1990.
In the 1970s, Stoppard achieved success with Jumpers (1972), a satirical work that compared the field of academic philosophy to gymnastics. and Travesties (1974), which depicts a chance encounter between Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Dadaist Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1917. Both plays won acclaim in Britain, with “Travesties” winning a Tony Award in 1976.
In the 1970s, Stoppard tweaked his political philosophy and language in plays such as Every Good Boy Deserves a Favor (1977), about Soviet dissidents, and Night and Day (1978), about journalistic ethics. The Real Thing (1982), a play within a play about an affair, impressed critics who said Stoppard had struck a nerve and written something far more personal than her previous work. He won a Tony Award in 1984 for “The Real Thing,” and again in 2000 for his revival of the play.
In the 1990s, his plays Arcadia and The Invention of Love (1997) received acclaim. Stoppard’s 2002 trilogy of plays, “The Shores of Utopia,” delves into the lives of people in pre-revolutionary Russia from 1833 to 1866. Running for a total of nine hours on stage, the play was directed by Trevor Nunn and performed in repertory at the Olivier Theater in London. The production moved to Broadway in 2006 and won the Tony Award for Best Picture in 2007.
Stoppard followed up that achievement with “Rock and Roll” (2006), another depiction of artistic opposition to the Soviet Union, this time set in his native Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Stoppard’s characters mix politics and music to question repressive regimes and so-called Soviet ideals.
After a nine-year hiatus, Stoppard returned in 2015 with the superintelligence drama The Hard Problem. The title refers to the question of whether matter can be separated from consciousness. Ben Brantley of The New York Times, reviewing the London production, said the play was neither boring nor clunky, stating, “There is more than the flashes of lightning wit and intellectual energy one associates with Mr. Stoppard. But this is the first time in this ever-exploring playwright’s work that ideas overwhelm the characters.”
But while the playwright delved into more personal issues later in his career, such as marriage and cultural identity, Stoppard still resisted self-examination. In 2008, he told the British newspaper The Guardian: “The parts of yourself in your work are expressed at will, without your cooperation, without your motive, without your complicity. You become what you write, and you can’t help but write as you are.”
On the film front, Stoppard co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Brazil (1985) and directed Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987), an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel. In addition to Shakespeare in Love, which he co-wrote with Mark Norman, his screenplays since 1990 have also included John le Carré’s The Russia House, El Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, Robert Harris’ novel Enigma, and an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. His last film, released in 2012, was an expressionist stylized version of the Russian classic, set primarily in a mock theater, and divided critics. At HBO, he also executive produced the adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s novel Parade’s End into the acclaimed 2012 miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch. He followed these projects with an adaptation of Deborah Mogach’s best-selling romance novel, Tulip Fever.
Stoppard also worked as an uncredited screenwriter in Hollywood, working on such films as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (George Lucas and Spielberg asked him to write the fourth film in the series), Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Sleepy Hollow, and K-19: Widowmaker.
Stoppard was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, the son of a Jewish doctor who worked for the Bata shoe company. Shortly before the Nazi occupation, Bata’s owner, Thomas J. Bata, helped transfer Jewish employees to his company’s operations around the world.
On March 15, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, Stoppard’s family fled to Singapore. Before Singapore was occupied by the Japanese, Thomas, his mother, and younger brother Petr fled again, while his father remained behind and worked as a doctor.
It wasn’t until more than 50 years later that Stoppard learned that her father had drowned in February 1942 when the ship he was on was bombed by the Japanese. Stoppard, then five years old, had arrived in Bombay with his mother and younger brother to start life as an English-speaking family.
Stoppard’s mother, who moved from Bombay to Darjeeling, met and married British Major Kenneth Stoppard in 1945, and left for England the following year. Two boys took his name.
In a 1999 Talk magazine article, Mr. Stoppard, who referred to himself as a “rebound Czech” in a peculiar play on words, said in a 1999 Talk magazine article that his late stepfather believed that “to be born British was to win the lottery in life.”
Stoppard did indeed embrace his Britishness, attending boarding schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire and excelling at cricket. An average student, Stoppard never went to university, and at the age of 17 he joined the Western Daily Press in Bristol as a journalist.
During his work as a reporter and drama critic, Stoppard met actor Peter O’Toole and became friendly with people working at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre. He then moved to London in 1962 to become a full-time writer, combining his work as a journalist with writing for radio and television, writing the novel Lord Marquist and Mr. Moon.
The Writers Guild of America awarded Stoppard the Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement in Motion Picture Writing in February 2013.
He is survived by his wife, Sabrina Guinness, and four sons, Oliver, digital artists Bernie and Bill, and actor Ed.
