For more than a half century, Tom Stoppard was one of the most acclaimed playwrights in the English-speaking theater. He has died at age 88. Stoppard won a Laurence Olivier Award and five Tony Awards for Best Play. His work, including Travesties, The Real Thing and The Invention of Love was known for its language, wit and intellectual curiosity.
Stoppard's death was reported by his agent.
Stoppard wrote erudite plays that touched on a broad range of topics – from his 1966 absurdist comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead about two minor characters from Hamlet — to his 1993 drama Arcadia which included dialogue about Chaos Theory and Garden Landscaping. But when Arcadia opened in New York, Stoppard told me his plays were always about people, not abstract ideas.
"I'm not some kind of intellectual who's importing very special ideas into the unfamiliar terrain of the theater. I don't see it like that at all," he said. "There's something about the way the plays are written about which makes people think that they're somewhat exclusive. And an exclusive playwright is a contradiction in terms."
In 1999, Stoppard won an Oscar for his verbal gymnastics in his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love starring Joseph Fiennes as the young playwright and Gwyneth Paltrow as his inspiration for Juliet.
English was not Stoppard's first language. He was born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a Jewish family. When he was still a baby, his family fled to Singapore to escape the Nazis. When his father died, the family moved to India, where his mother remarried a British officer named Stoppard. In 1946, they settled in England. His family assimilated and Stoppard said he didn't learn of his Jewish heritage until his 50s.
"It was a combination of my mother not looking backwards and liking to talk about the past, on the one hand," Stoppard told Jeff Lunden in 2022. "On the other hand, there was my strange lack of curiosity. I'd been turned into a little English boy. I was very happy being a little English boy. I didn't need to become somebody else. I already was somebody else."
Stoppard never attended university. At 17, he began work as a journalist. Later he went on to become a theater critic, and finally a playwright.
"It's a strange art form, isn't it?" Stoppard mused during a rehearsal break in 2006. "There's a lot of people in a large room, watching a few people at one end of the room dressing up and talking. And you've got to hear everything they say — you get to hear it once, you can't turn the page back."
Stoppard was talking about the difficulty of holding the audience's attention through his epic nine-hour trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, about 19th-century Russian intellectuals. Movie star Ethan Hawke gave up seven months of more lucrative work to perform in The Coast of Utopia. He said the chance to read Stoppard's lines was worth it.
"We're used to being talked down to. We're used to very simple ideas. We're used to people not challenging us," Hawke said. "I feel the great thing about watching Tom Stoppard, when you watch it, it makes you feel incredibly intelligent. Because you do get it. The ideas aren't that complicated."
In 1995, Stoppard said he loved the theater in all its forms.
"Things are done well, or they're done not so well," he said. "And that's the only distinction which matters in the theater. I think that I consider myself to be at some place in the spectrum of entertainers. Theater is a popular art form. If I didn't think that, I'd be trying to write some kind of book of essays perhaps. I don't know. I love the theater. I'm a theater animal."
And the theater loved him back. The adjective "Stoppardian" entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. It means to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns — in the style of Tom Stoppard.
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