Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter who won an Academy Award for “Shakespeare in Love” has died. He was 88.
His dazzling command of language earned him a record five Tony Awards for best play — beginning with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and culminating with “Leopoldstadt.”
“We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved client and friend, Tom Stoppard, has died peacefully at home in Dorset, 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,” United Agents told TheWrap.
Stoppard’s work transcended that of a typical playwright; his unique takes on classics earned him a reputation as a curious and playful scribe who enjoyed chasing creativity and exploring a range of human experiences.
In a 1988 interview with The Paris Review, Stoppard admitted to preferring one style of dialogue over all others. “In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness,” he explained. “I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.”
The goal, he continued, was always to write a play that would hold up throughout its entire run. “I like surface gloss, but it’s all too easy to get that right for the first night only to find that that was the best performance of the play; from then on the gloss starts cracking apart. The ideal is to make the groundwork so deep and solid that the actors are continually discovering new possibilities under the surface, so that the best performance turns out to be the last one.”
Stoppard was then best known for 1982’s “The Real Thing” as well as 1993’s “Arcadia.” In the same interview, he explained of the first: “The subject matter of the play exists before the story and it is always something abstract. I get interested by a notion of some kind and see that it has dramatic possibilities. Gradually I see how a pure idea can be married with a dramatic event. But it is still not a play until you invent a plausible narrative. Sometimes this is not too hard—’The Real Thing’ was fairly straightforward.”
Stoppard’s work didn’t begin and end with the stage; he also wrote screenplays for several films, including “Shakespeare in Love” (1988) and “Empire of the Sun” (1987). He also directed the film version of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” in 1990, which starred Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.
While speaking to Cherwell in 2008, Stoppard revealed writing screenplays differs from writing plays in a key way. “I don’t use the same parts of myself because I’m always treading on someone else’s work … When I get turned on by a film job, I have a great time doing it,” he said, before noting that the script for “Shakespeare in Love” worked because director John Madden “made sure it worked as a love story.”
But that didn’t mean working with directors was always easy. “Sometimes it goes horribly wrong. I spent a long time on the Philip Pullman trilogy, but there was no director attached, and it was a completely wasted period as it turns out because the director likes to write his own scripts,” he added. “But I like working with directors.”
Tom Stoppard was born Thomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia in 1937. His family left the country to escape the Nazis and ended up in Singapore for a few years. Stoppard’s father died during the Japanese takeover of the country, and he and his mother fled to India.
The family moved once more to England when Stoppard was eight, and he adopted the last name of his stepfather. In fact, Stoppard later revealed he didn’t know he was Jewish until he was well into adulthood and his stepfather asked him to change his name back. “It affected me much less than people thought it had to affect me – and maybe it just came too late,” Stoppard wrote.
Stoppard used these experiences in his work, and his time in India played an especially important role in his imagination. “I was only eight when I left, but dreamed about India all my life. I used to have dreams about being in India – the kind of dreams where you are very, very sorry to wake up – there’s something kind of poignant about it,” he explained in the interview with Cherwell.
Stoppard never pursued higher education and began working as a journalist as a young adult. “I came to regret it … but I was anxious to start earning my own living … Probably I was sick of being in the sixth form and didn’t take into account what a liberation being a student would be … but I don’t regret being a journalist I think I got a lot from it,” he said in the 2008 interview.
It was his work at the Bristol Evening World that introduced him to the world of theater and stage production; he began writing plays after a planned novel failed to come to fruition.
Stoppard married three times; first to Josie Ingle from 1965-1972, second to Miriam Stoppard from 1972 to 1992, and he and Sabrina Guinness married in 2014. He is survived by Guinness, who hails from the famous brewing company family and once dated King Charles, as well as by his sons Oliver and Barnaby, whom he shared with Josie, and Ed and Will, whom he shared with Miriam.
