Tom Stoppard, the ingenious Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter whose gift for wordplay led him to a record five Tony Awards for best play, the first for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the last for Leopoldstadt, and an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, has died. He was 88.
Stoppard died at his home in Dorset, England, surrounded by his family, his agents announced. “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.
Stoppard received his first Academy Award nomination for co-writing Brazil (1985) with director Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, adapted John le Carre‘s novel for The Russia House (1990) and did an uncredited revision on the screenplay for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), with director Steven Spielberg noting that “Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue.”
Stoppard was considered one of the finest British playwrights of all time, and critics called his writing “intellectually dazzling” and his comedic ideas “acrobatic.” He inspired the term “Stoppardian,” which has come to be defined as “dealing with philosophical concepts in a witty, ironic and linguistically complex way, usually with multiple timelines and visual humor.”
“I don’t think Stoppardian has a precise definition,” he self-deprecatingly told The Telegraph in 2010. “To me, it means another hapless, feckless, fatuous episode in my life, brought on by my own forgetfulness or incompetence.”
He began his career as a journalist and drama critic and wrote with a Swiss-made silver Caran d’Ache fountain pen (no typewriter or computer keyboard for him).
The Oscar best picture winner Shakespeare in Love (1998), directed by John Madden, seemed tailor-made for Stoppard, who had won acclaim for his 1968 Tony-winning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that is told through the confused eyes of two minor characters.
Likewise, Shakespeare in Love takes the story of the Bard and adds a creative twist. Fellow screenwriter Marc Norman invented the storyline — Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) suffers writer’s block until he meets his muse, Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) — and Stoppard fleshed out the final product, including the dialogue.
“There were moments when the challenge became, ‘How does Shakespeare speak when he’s just speaking to a friend?’” Stoppard told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. “Does he sound like Shakespeare? Does he sound as though he’s going to be Shakespeare, or does he sound like anybody else?
“The thing that makes life easier for someone writing fiction about Shakespeare is that there are very few signposts, very few agreed-upon facts and lots of spaces to invent [during his life from 1585-92]. Some of the film is pure mischief. But then again, you’re riding on the back of [Romeo and Juliet,] the most famous love story ever written, so there are lots of strands to work with.”
Shakespeare in Love‘s best picture triumph, engineered by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax Films, came over Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and represented one of the greatest upsets in Oscar history.
Stoppard, who considered himself “a theater writer who sometimes does other stuff,” also worked on the screenplays for Otto Preminger’s The Human Factor (1979), Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987), Robert Benton‘s Billy Bathgate (1991), Michael Apted‘s Enigma (2001), Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (2012) and Tulip Fever (2017).
When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead debuted in London and on Broadway in 1967, it was hailed as a masterpiece, and at 30, he became the youngest playwright to get a staging at the Royal National Theatre. When asked at the time what the play was about, he famously replied, “It’s about to make me very rich.”
His other Tonys were for Travesties in 1976, The Real Thing in 1984 and The Coast of Utopia in 2007.
Born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, he moved in 1939 with his parents and brother to Singapore to escape the Nazis during World War II. When the Japanese invaded the country three years later, he fled with his mother and brother to Australia and then India; his father stayed behind and was ultimately killed.
In 1946, his mother married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England, where Tomas Straussler became Tom Stoppard.
At age 17, Stoppard left school and became a journalist. “I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn’t wait to be out of education,” he said. “I wanted to be a reporter, and I had a wonderful time doing it.” He worked for Western Daily Press, then moved to the Bristol Evening World in 1958 as a feature writer, humor columnist and secondary drama critic.
Stoppard then served as a freelance drama critic for Scene, a British literary magazine. He often wrote under the pen name “William Boot,” a self-deprecating homage to Evelyn Waugh’s supercilious journalist in his 1938 novel, Scoop.
He wrote his first play, A Walk on the Water, in 1960, and it was televised three years later. He also worked on several episodes of A Student’s Diary: An Arab in London for the BBC.
In 1966, Stoppard wrote his first — and only — novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon. Set in contemporary London, the story features an eclectic, surreal mix of characters: a lion, two cowboys and a donkey-riding Irishman who claims to be Jesus Christ.
Following the success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote two plays in 1968: Enter a Free Man (a revised version of Walk on the Water) and The Incredible Inspector Hound.
His stage work was exceptional in the 1970s, including the surreal After Magritte, the philosophical Jumpers and the satirical Travesties, a parody of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The decade was particularly productive for Stoppard; he also wrote Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, 15-Minute Hamlet, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Night and Day, Undiscovered County and Dogg’s Hamlet.
He wrote and directed the 1990 feature adaptation of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which starred Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. It received a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, controversially winning over Martin Scorsese‘s Goodfellas.
“It’s hard to explain why I ended up [writing and directing]. My memory of this is that it made it easier to get the little money we needed if the writer was directing it,” he said. “I think the theory being since I had never directed a film, I might turn out to be a great film director. I realized pretty soon that if this was going to be adjusted and adapted, I was the person who would be the least defensive about it. I felt it needed a bit of disrespect.”
It was his first and only directorial attempt, which Stoppard said was “only because I’m lazy.”
Later, Stoppard became increasingly concerned about civil rights issues, in particular the political repression in Eastern Europe. In 1997, he met the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, which was under the fascist boot of the Soviet Union, and worked to have Havel’s writings translated.
In 2002, he wrote The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of plays (Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage) about political radicalism in 19th century Russia, and 2023’s Leopoldstadt revolved around the destructive toll of antisemitism on a family of Viennese Jews.
In a 2015 interview with The Wheeler Centre, Stoppard discussed the complexity of theater. “I like performances to be strangely neutral,” he said. “If I write a line [that] is sarcastic, if it’s delivered sarcastically, then it’s over-egged and the audience is being denied the pleasure of forming its own view of what the thought behind the utterance actually is.”
He continued, “[Live performance is] one of the wonderful mysteries of our culture and always has been. What I like to exploit, if I can, is the audience’s subconscious sense of the severe limitations of a theater stage.”
The playwright, who was knighted in 1997, was married three times, the last in 2014 to Sabrina Guinness, who had dated the likes of Prince Charles, Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger. He had four children, including actor Ed Stoppard (The Pianist, The Crown).
Stoppard said that there is a “misapprehension about creative writing, which is that the writer is working from a set of principles or a thesis and the play is the end product of that predisposition, but, actually, the idea turns out to be the end product of the play, and the less I know about this play I am trying to write, the better.”
When asked where his ideas sprang from, Stoppard responded, “Harrods,” the chain of British department stores.