LONDON (AP) — British playwright Tom Stoppard, a playful, penetrating playwright, has died. He was 88.
In a statement on 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 genius and humanity, and for his humor, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his deep love of the English language,” they said. ”“It was an honor to work with and get to know Tom.”
Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was honored with accolades, including a shelf full of theater gongs.
His mind-bending plays dealt with Shakespeare, science, philosophy and the historical 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” from 1984; “The Coast of Utopia” in 2007; and “Leopoldstadt” in 2023.
He won an Academy Award for the screenplay of 1998’s ‘Shakespeare In Love’.
Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was their “blend of language, knowledge and feeling”. … It’s those three things that make him so remarkable.
The writer was born in 1937 as Tomás Sträussler into 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 troops approached the city, Tomas, 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 worn-out post-war Britain. Eight-year-old Tom ‘dressed English like a coat’, he later said, and grew up to be a typical Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare.
He did not go to university, but began his career at the age of 17 as a journalist for newspapers in Bristol, south-west 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 broke through on the stage with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which reimagined Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the point of view of two hapless minor characters. A mix of tragedy and absurdist humour, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was performed 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 performed in 1968); ‘Jumpers’ (1972), a mix of physical and philosophical gymnastics, and ‘Travesties’ (1974), which brought intellectuals such as James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin to clash in Zurich during the First World War.
The musical drama ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favor’ (1977) was a collaboration with composer Andre Previn about a Soviet dissident locked up in a mental institution – part of Stoppard’s long involvement with human rights advocacy groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
He often played with time and structure. ‘The Real Thing’ (1982) was a gripping romantic comedy about love and deception with plays within a play, while ‘Arcadia’ (1993) moved between modern times and the early 19th century, where characters in an English country house debated poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate gave them meaning.
“The Invention of Love” (1997) explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of English poet AE Housman.
Stoppard entered 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 fortunes of the 1960s counterculture in Britain and communist Czechoslovakia.
“The Hard Problem” (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the lenses of science and religion.
Stoppard was a strong supporter of freedom of expression and worked with organizations such as PEN and Index on Censorship. He further claimed to have no strong political views, writing in 1968: “I burn for no reason. I cannot say that I write with any social purpose. You write because you really love writing.”
Some critics found his plays cleverer than emotionally compelling. But biographer Lee said many of his plays contained a “sense of underlying sadness.”
“People in his plays… history is closing in on them,” Lee said at a British Library event in 2021. “They show up, they don’t know why they’re there, they don’t know if they can get home again. They’re often in exile, they can barely remember their own names. They may have been wrongly imprisoned. They may have a terrible moral dilemma that they don’t know how to solve. They may have lost someone. And again and again I think you get that sense of loss and loss. longing for these very funny, witty plays.”
This was especially true of his late play “Leopoldstadt,” which based his own family’s story on the story of a Jewish Viennese family in the first half of the 20th century. Stoppard said he began thinking about his personal connection to the Holocaust quite late in life, and only discovered 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 these days — while my mother was alive, because she always avoided going into it herself,” Stoppard told The New Yorker in 2022.
“It would be misleading to see me as someone who cheerfully and innocently, at the age of 40, thought, ‘Oh my God, 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 like I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn’t really true.”
“Leopoldstadt” premiered in London in early 2020 to rave reviews; weeks later, all theaters were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It eventually opened on Broadway in late 2022 and went on to win four Tonys.
Stoppard was dazzlingly productive and also wrote many radio plays, a novel, television series including “Parade’s End” (2013) and many film screenplays. These include the dystopian Terry Gilliam comedy “Brazil” (1985), the Steven Spielberg-directed war drama “Empire of the Sun” (1987), the Elizabethan rom-com “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) – for which he and Marc Norman shared a best adapted screenplay – the code-breaking thriller “Enigma” (2001) and the Russian epic “Anna Karenina” (2012).
He also wrote and directed a 1990 film adaptation of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” and translated numerous works into English, including plays by the dissident Czech writer Václav Havel, who became the 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 actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.
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