LONDON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0British playwright Tom Stoppard, a giant of modern theater and Oscar-winning screenwriter known for playful, probing works of erudition and wit, has died. He was 88.<\/p>\n
In a statement Saturday, United Agents said Stoppard died \u201cpeacefully\u201d at his home in Dorset in southern England, surrounded by his family.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe 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,\u201d it said. \u201dIt was an honor to work with Tom and to know him.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was garlanded with honors, including a shelf full of theater gongs. Dizzyingly prolific, he also wrote radio plays, a novel, television series and many celebrated screenplays, including 1998\u2019s \u201cShakespeare in Love,\u201d which won an Academy Award.<\/p>\n
Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was among those paying tribute, calling Stoppard \u201ca giant of the English theater, both highly intellectual and very funny in all his plays and scripts.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had a dazzling wit and loved classical and popular music alike, which often featured in his huge body of work,\u201d said Jagger, who produced the 2001 film \u201cEnigma,\u201d featuring a screenplay by Stoppard. \u201cHe was amusing and quietly sardonic. A friend and companion, and I will always miss him.\u201d<\/p>\n
King Charles III said Stoppard was \u201ca dear friend who wore his genius lightly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Theaters in London\u2019s West End will dim their lights for two minutes Tuesday in tribute.<\/p>\n
Over a six-decade career, his brain-teasing plays ranged across Shakespeare, science, philosophy and the historic tragedies of the 20th century. <\/p>\n
Five of them won Tony Awards for best play: \u201cRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead\u201d in 1968, \u201cTravesties\u201d in 1976, \u201cThe Real Thing\u201d in 1984, \u201cThe Coast of Utopia\u201d in 2007 and \u201cLeopoldstadt\u201d in 2023.<\/p>\n
Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was their \u201cmixture of language, knowledge and feeling. \u2026 It\u2019s those three things in gear together which make him so remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The writer was born Tom\u00e1s Str\u00e4ussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zl\u00edn 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.<\/p>\n
In late 1941, as Japanese forces closed in on the city, Tom\u00e1s, 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.<\/p>\n
In 1946 his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to threadbare postwar Britain. The 8-year-old Tom \u201cput on Englishness like a coat,\u201d he later said, growing up to be a quintessential Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare.<\/p>\n
He did not go to a university but began his career, aged 17, as a journalist at newspapers in Bristol, southwest England, and then as a theater critic for Scene magazine in London.<\/p>\n
He wrote plays for radio and television including \u201cA Walk on the Water,\u201d broadcast in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with \u201cRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,\u201d which reimagined Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cHamlet\u201d from the viewpoint of two hapless minor characters. A mix of tragedy and absurdist humor, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was staged at Britain\u2019s National Theatre, then run by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.<\/p>\n
A stream of exuberant, innovative plays followed, including meta-whodunnit \u201cThe Real Inspector Hound\u201d (first staged in 1968); \u201cJumpers\u201d (1972), a blend of physical and philosophical gymnastics; and \u201cTravesties\u201d (1974), which set intellectuals including James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin colliding in Zurich during World War I.<\/p>\n
The musical drama \u201cEvery Good Boy Deserves Favor\u201d (1977) was a collaboration with composer Andre Previn about a Soviet dissident confined to a mental institution \u2014 part of Stoppard\u2019s long involvement with groups advocating for human rights groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n
He often played with time and structure. \u201cThe Real Thing\u201d (1982) was a poignant romantic comedy about love and deception that featured plays within a play. \u201cArcadia\u201d (1993) moved between the modern era and the early 19th century, in which characters at an English country house debated poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate had its way with them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Invention of Love\u201d (1997) explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of the English poet A.E. Housman.<\/p>\n
Stoppard began the 21st century with \u201cThe Coast of Utopia\u201d (2002), an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, and drew on his own background for \u201cRock \u2019n\u2019 Roll\u201d (2006), which contrasted the fates of the 1960s counterculture in Britain and in communist Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Hard Problem\u201d (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the lenses of science and religion.<\/p>\n
Stoppard was a devoted champion of free speech who worked with organizations including PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed not to have strong political views otherwise, writing in 1968: \u201cI burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some critics found his plays more clever than emotionally engaging. But biographer Lee said many of his plays contained a \u201csense of underlying grief.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople in his plays \u2026 history comes at them,\u201d Lee said at a British Library event in 2021. \u201cThey turn up, they don\u2019t know why they\u2019re there, they don\u2019t know whether they can get home again. They\u2019re often in exile, they can barely remember their own name. They may have been wrongfully incarcerated. They may have some terrible moral dilemma they don\u2019t know how to solve. They may have lost someone. And over and over again I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny, witty plays.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was especially true of his late play \u201cLeopoldstadt,\u201d which drew on his own family\u2019s story for the tale of a Jewish Viennese family over the first half of the 20th century. Stoppard said he began thinking of his personal link to the Holocaust quite late in life, only discovering after his mother\u2019s death in 1996 that many members of his family, including all four grandparents, had died in concentration camps.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t have written about my heritage \u2014 that\u2019s the word for it nowadays \u2014 while my mother was alive, because she\u2019d always avoided getting into it herself,\u201d Stoppard told the New Yorker in 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be misleading to see me as somebody who blithely and innocently, at the age of 40-something, thought, \u2018Oh, my goodness, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cOf course I knew, but I didn\u2019t know who they were. And I didn\u2019t feel I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn\u2019t really true.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLeopoldstadt\u201d premiered in London at the start of 2020 to rave reviews; weeks later all theaters were shut by the COVID-19 pandemic. It eventually opened in Broadway in late 2022, going on to win four Tonys.<\/p>\n
Stoppard\u2019s catalog of screenplays included the Terry Gilliam dystopian comedy \u201cBrazil\u201d (1985), the Steven Spielberg-directed war drama \u201cEmpire of the Sun\u201d (1987), Elizabethan rom com \u201cShakespeare in Love\u201d (1998) \u2014 for which he and Marc Norman shared a best adapted screenplay Oscar \u2014 code-breaking thriller \u201cEnigma\u201d (2001) and Russian epic \u201cAnna Karenina\u201d (2012).<\/p>\n
He also wrote and directed a 1990 film adaptation of \u201cRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,\u201d wrote the 2013 TV series \u201cParade\u2019s End\u201d and translated numerous works into English, including plays by dissident Czech writer V\u00e1clav Havel, who became his country\u2019s first post-communist president.<\/p>\n
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his services to literature.<\/p>\n
He was married three times: to Jose Ingle, Miriam Stern \u2014 better known as the health journalist Dr. Miriam Stoppard \u2014 and TV producer Sabrina Guinness. The first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by four children, including the actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.<\/p>\n
Lawless writes for the Associated Press. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0British playwright Tom Stoppard, a giant of modern theater and Oscar-winning screenwriter known for playful, probing works of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":413947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[9434,1582,276,71231,124033,9254,316,27792,194377,2961,224,5337,194373,194375,194374,130187,19916,21194,194376,194378],"class_list":{"0":"post-413946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-brilliance","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-dorset","12":"tag-generosity","13":"tag-giant","14":"tag-home","15":"tag-humanity","16":"tag-irreverence","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-losangeles","20":"tag-modern-theater","21":"tag-oscar-winning-screenwriter","22":"tag-playwright-tom-stoppard","23":"tag-southern-england","24":"tag-spirit","25":"tag-statement-saturday","26":"tag-united-agents","27":"tag-wit"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115635821293828401","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}