British playwright Tom Stoppard, who gained an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s “Shakespeare In Love,” has died. He was 88.
United Brokers mentioned in a press release Saturday that Stoppard died “peacefully” at his residence in Dorset in southern England, surrounded by his household.
“He will likely be remembered for his works, for his or her brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language. It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him,” the assertion mentioned.
Tom Stoppard on the 76th Tony Awards held on the United Palace Theatre on June 11, 2023 in New York Metropolis.
Steve Eichner/WWD through Getty Photographs
“My spouse and I are deeply saddened to study of the loss of life of one in all our best writers, Sir Tom Stoppard,” King Charles mentioned in a press release. “A pricey buddy who wore his genius flippantly, he might, and did, flip his pen to any topic, difficult, transferring and provoking his audiences, borne from his personal private historical past. We ship our most heartfelt sympathy to his beloved household. Allow us to all take consolation in his immortal line: “Look on each exit as being an entrance some place else.”
Stoppard was born within the Czech Republic in 1937. His household fled to Singapore after Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1939. He, his brother and their mom fled once more when Japanese forces closed in on town in 1941. His father died attempting to depart town. His mom married an English officer in 1946, and the household moved to postwar Britain. The 8-year-old Tom “placed on Englishness like a coat,” he later mentioned, rising as much as be a quintessential Englishman who cherished cricket and Shakespeare.
Stoppard first labored as a journalist earlier than turning to theater within the Sixties. Stoppard was typically hailed as the best British playwright of his technology and was garlanded with honors, together with a shelf filled with theater gongs.
His brain-teasing performs ranged throughout Shakespeare, science, philosophy and the historic tragedies of the twentieth century. 5 of them gained Tony Awards for finest play: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Useless” in 1968; “Travesties” in 1976; “The Actual Factor” in 1984; “The Coast of Utopia” in 2007; and “Leopoldstadt” in 2023.
He wrote performs for radio and tv together with “A Stroll on the Water,” televised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Useless,” which reimagined Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the perspective of two hapless minor characters.
Stoppard was a robust champion of free speech who labored with organizations together with PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed to not have robust political opinions in any other case, writing in 1968: “I burn with no causes. I can not say that I write with any social goal. One writes as a result of one loves writing, actually.”
That was very true of his late play “Leopoldstadt,” which drew on his circle of relatives’s story for the story of a Jewish Viennese household over the primary half of the twentieth century. Stoppard mentioned he started pondering of his private hyperlink to the Holocaust fairly late in life, solely discovering after his mom’s loss of life in 1996 that many members of his household, together with all 4 grandparents, had died in focus camps.
“Leopoldstadt” premiered in London at the beginning of 2020 to rave evaluations; weeks later all theaters have been shut by the COVID-19 pandemic. It will definitely opened on Broadway in late 2022, happening to win 4 Tonys.
Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard additionally wrote many radio performs, a novel, tv collection together with “Parade’s Finish” (2013) and lots of movie screenplays. These included dystopian Terry Gilliam comedy “Brazil” (1985), Steven Spielberg-directed warfare drama “Empire of the Solar” (1987), Elizabethan romcom “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) — for which he and Marc Norman shared a finest tailored screenplay Oscar — code breaking thriller “Enigma” (2001) and Russian epic “Anna Karenina” (2012).
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his companies to literature.