Tom Stoppard has died. A multiple Tony Award winner for his work as a playwright—most famously Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, first staged in 1966, but also numerous other highly influential productions—Stoppard was also a prolific screenwriter. Although he won only a single Oscar over the course of a long career, for his script for Shakespeare In Love, Stoppard was a fixture both in and out of Hollywood, famously lending his occasional services as a script doctor amidst his more celebrated work on the stage. Per the BBC, Stoppard died on Saturday at his home in Dorset, in England. He was 88.
Born (as Tomáš Sträussler) to a Jewish family in what’s now the Czech Republic in 1937, Stoppard was just two years old when his family was forced to flee Europe to escape Nazi persecution. Raised for several years in Singapore and India before ultimately journeying to England (where he took his stepfather’s last name), Stoppard originally worked as a journalist. He transitioned into dramaturgy in the 1950s and 1960s, ultimately gaining national recognition when Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in ’66 and became a quick sensation. Blending Beckett, Shakespeare, and Stoppard’s own lifelong obsession with wordplay and verbal games, the play quickly swept multiple continents, making an international name out of the still-young former school dropout. A Broadway run that began in 1967 earned Stoppard the first of what would ultimately be five Tonys for Best Play. (The most recent, for Leopoldstadt, which tracked the historical fortunes of a Jewish family not dissimilar to Stoppard’s own, arrived in 2023.)
Now an established force in theater—where his plays developed over time from philosophical word games into more grounded, and often historically minded, material—Stoppard began pursuing a parallel career in screenwriting in the late 1970s. In 1985, he co-penned the dystopian, absurdist script for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and later became a go-to resource for Steven Spielberg on multiple projects. (Writing the first draft of a script for Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire Of The Sun, and, by the director’s own account, doing a pass that produced almost all of the final dialogue for 1989’s Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.) (A similarly uncredited job, years later, on George Lucas’ script for Star Wars: Episode III produced slightly less widely acclaimed results.) In 1990, Stoppard directed the only film of his career, an adaptation of Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern that earned praise for Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and Richard Dreyfuss’ performances, but which critics said struggled with the difficulties of adapting such a highly verbal play to the screen.
Stoppard continued to work tirelessly from the 1990s through to the last years of his life. In 1998, he won his sole Oscar, for co-writing, with Marc Norman, the script for John Madden’s Shakespeare In Love. (The year previous, he’d been made a Knight Of The Order Of The British Empire for his contributions to theater on behalf of his adopted home.) His later work also embraced his original homeland more fully, notably his 2006 play Rock ‘n’ Roll, which contrasted the rise of musical counterculture in 1960s England with bands struggling to launch something similar while living under the strict rule of the Warsaw Pact. (Stoppard later noted that the play was, in part, an attempt to reckon with what his life would have been like if his family had returned to Czechoslovakia after World War II.) Late-career highlights on both stage and screen included writing 2012’s Anna Karenina for film, 2013’s Parade’s End for television—Stoppard reportedly calling TV writing a mixed experience, dubbing it “A terrible use of one’s time, in a sense”—and, finally, Leopolstadt, the final play of his long, varied, and storied career. In a 2022 interview with The New Yorker, Stoppard talked about his restless desire to never stop working, but also said, of Leopoldstadt, that,
If my last direct experience of writing plays would turn out to be sitting in the Wyndham’s Theatre, in London, and then the Longacre Theatre, in New York City—sitting in those houses which have been there a long time, with all kinds of work on their boards—watching and listening to Leopoldstadt, that will be a fortunate destiny. I would consider myself blessed.
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