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British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard has died, aged 88.
He wrote dozens of plays — among them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia and Jumpers — in a career that spanned six decades and also included the writing of film scripts, television and radio plays, adaptations and translations.
The word “Stoppardian” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1993 in reference to the wit, eloquence and philosophical considerations that characterise his work.
Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, two years before his family fled the Nazis. They first went to Singapore, then he and his mother and brother boarded a ship bound for Australia that was diverted to India.
Later, when his father followed, his ship was fatally bombed by the Japanese. In 1945 his mother remarried, and Major Kenneth Stoppard gave his stepson a new name, nationality and home in England. Schooled in Yorkshire, he first became interested in the theatre while working in Bristol as a journalist, according to a later biographer.
Early success came in 1967 with Stoppard’s first play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet take centre stage.
He later delved into eastern European culture, investigating exiled Russian thinkers in his trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), and in Rock ‘n’ Roll he posited a hero called Jan who spent his wartime childhood in England but returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948 — an alternative version of his own life.
One of his best-known plays, 1993’s Arcadia, wistfully evoked his love of England, while a later play Leopoldstadt offered an epic portrayal of a Jewish family in Vienna. He was knighted for services to literature by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
He also co-wrote the freewheeling dystopian Terry Gilliam film Brazil (1985) and won an Academy Award for the screenplay of 1998 film Shakespeare In Love.
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 brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language,” the statement said. “It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him.”
Speaking in 2021, his biographer Hermione Lee said of his work: “People in his plays . . . history comes at them. They turn up, they don’t know why they’re there, they don’t know whether they can get home again . . . over and over again I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny, witty plays.”
Stoppard was married three times and is survived by his third wife, four children and several grandchildren.
Additional reporting by AP