British playwright Tom Stoppard, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s “Shakespeare In Love,” has died. He was 88.
United Agents said in a statement Saturday that 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. It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him,” the statement said.
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Stoppard was born in the Czech Republic in 1937. His family fled to Singapore after Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1939. He, his brother and their mother fled again when Japanese forces closed in on the city in 1941. His father died trying to leave the city. His mother married an English officer in 1946, and the family moved to 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.
Stoppard first worked as a journalist before turning to theater in the 1960s. 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.
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.
Stoppard was a strong champion of free speech who worked with organizations including PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed not to have strong political views otherwise, writing in 1968: “I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.”
That was especially true of his late play “Leopoldstadt,” which drew on his own family’s story for the tale of a Jewish Viennese family over the first half of the 20th century. Stoppard said he began thinking of his personal link to the Holocaust quite late in life, only discovering after his mother’s death in 1996 that many members of his family, including all four grandparents, had died in concentration camps.
“Leopoldstadt” premiered in London at the start of 2020 to rave reviews; weeks later all theaters were shut by the COVID-19 pandemic. It eventually opened on Broadway in late 2022, going on to win four Tonys.
Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard also wrote many radio plays, a novel, television series including “Parade’s End” (2013) and many film screenplays. These included dystopian Terry Gilliam comedy “Brazil” (1985), Steven Spielberg-directed war drama “Empire of the Sun” (1987), Elizabethan romcom “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) — for which he and Marc Norman shared a best adapted screenplay Oscar — code breaking thriller “Enigma” (2001) and Russian epic “Anna Karenina” (2012).
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his services to literature.
