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Tom Stoppard, the playwright whose work ranged from cerebral theatre to Hollywood blockbusters, has died at the age of 88.
Friends and admirers reacted with dismay to his death on Saturday in the United Kingdom, where he took the theatrical world by storm in the 1960s and became one of the nation’s greatest literary talents.
British playwright Tom Stoppard has died, aged 88.Credit: AP
The success of his sharp dialogue on stage led film directors to seek him out to create movies, including Shakespeare in Love – for which he shared the Oscar for best original screenplay – and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
His agent said he died peacefully at his 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,” the firm, United Agents, said in a statement.
“It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him.”
In a sign of the breadth of his appeal and the range of his friendships, his death drew reactions from rock stars and writers who praised his life and work.
“Tom Stoppard was my favourite playwright,” said Mick Jagger in a social media post. “He leaves us with a majestic body of intellectual and amusing work. I will always miss him.”
Australian writer Kathy Lette described Stoppard as one of the wittiest people she had ever met.
“A conversation with him left you reeling from irreverent and imaginative quip-lash,” she posted.
While Stoppard rose to the heights of English literature, he was born to Czech parents in 1937 and spent his early life in what was then Czechoslovakia before fleeing with his family to Singapore and India.
Tom Stoppard poses with the Tony award for best play for “Leopoldstadt” in 2023.Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
After his father died in Singapore in 1942, his mother, Martha, married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and moved the family to England in 1946.
Stoppard, who described himself as a “bounced Czech”, only learned of his family’s Jewish heritage late in life – and discovered that all four of his grandparents had died in the Holocaust. He was raised with his brother as an English boy and told little about his mother’s early life.
While he began his working life as a journalist in Bristol in his late teenage years, he was drawn to the theatre and began by writing plays for radio and television.
Stoppard’s breakthrough came with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
His breakthrough came in 1963 when his first major stage play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” packed theatres by creating a comic drama out of two of the minor characters in “Hamlet” – using some of Shakespeare’s dialogue.
He combined history, philosophy and comedy in a series of plays, including “Travesties” in 1974, in which he created a meeting historical figures such as James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin during the First World War.
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