LONDON — British playwright Tom Stoppard, a giant of modern theater and Oscar-winning screenwriter known for erudition and wit, has died. He was 88.
In a statement Saturday, United Agents said 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 said. ”It was an honor to work with Tom and to know him.”
The Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was garlanded with honors, including a shelf full of theater gongs. Dizzyingly prolific, he also wrote radio plays, a novel, television series and many celebrated screenplays, including 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love,” which won an Academy Award.
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.
Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was their “mixture of language, knowledge and feeling. … It’s those three things in gear together which 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 closed in on the city, Tomás, his brother and their mother fled again, this time to India. His father stayed behind and later died when his ship was attacked as he tried to leave Singapore.
In 1946 his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to threadbare 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.
He did not go to a university but began his career, aged 17, as a journalist at newspapers in Bristol, southwest England, and then as a theater critic for Scene magazine in London.
He wrote plays for radio and television including “A Walk on the Water,” broadcast 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. A mix of tragedy and absurdist humor, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was staged at Britain’s National Theatre, then run by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.
A stream of exuberant, innovative plays followed, including meta-whodunnit “The Real Inspector Hound” (first staged in 1968); “Jumpers” (1972), a blend of physical and philosophical gymnastics; and “Travesties” (1974), which set intellectuals including James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin colliding in Zurich during World War I.
The musical drama “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” (1977) was a collaboration with composer Andre Previn about a Soviet dissident confined to a mental institution — part of Stoppard’s long involvement with groups advocating for human rights groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
He often played with time and structure. “The Real Thing” (1982) was a poignant romantic comedy about love and deception that featured plays within a play. “Arcadia” (1993) moved between the modern era and the early 19th century, in which characters at an English country house debated poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate had its way with them.
“The Invention of Love” (1997) explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of the English poet A.E. 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 the 1960s counterculture in Britain and in communist Czechoslovakia.
“The Hard Problem” (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the lenses of science and religion.
Stoppard was a devoted 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.”
Some critics found his plays more clever than emotionally engaging. But biographer Lee said many of his plays contained a “sense of underlying grief.”
“People in his plays … history comes at 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 whether they can get home again. They’re often in exile, they can barely remember their own name. They may have been wrongfully incarcerated. They may have some terrible moral dilemma they don’t know how to solve. They may have lost someone. And over and over again I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny, witty plays.”
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.
“I wouldn’t have written about my heritage — that’s the word for it nowadays — while my mother was alive, because she’d always avoided getting into it herself,” Stoppard told the New Yorker in 2022.
“It would be misleading to see me as somebody who blithely and innocently, at the age of 40-something, thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, 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 I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn’t really true.”
“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 in Broadway in late 2022, going on to win four Tonys.
Stoppard’s catalog of screenplays included the Terry Gilliam dystopian comedy “Brazil” (1985), the Steven Spielberg-directed war drama “Empire of the Sun” (1987), Elizabethan rom com “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 also wrote and directed a 1990 film adaptation of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” wrote the 2013 TV series “Parade’s End” and translated numerous works into English, including plays by dissident Czech writer Václav Havel, who became his 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 Jose Ingle, Miriam Stern — better known as the health journalist Dr. Miriam Stoppard — and TV producer Sabrina Guinness. The first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by four children, including the actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.
