Tom Stoppard, acclaimed playwright and screenwriter, dies at 88 : NPR

For more than half a century, Tom Stoppard was one of the most acclaimed playwrights in the English-speaking theatre. He died at the age of 88. Stoppard won the Laurence Olivier Award and Five Tony Awards for Best Play. His work also includes Travesties, the real thing And invention of Love Was known for his language, intelligence and intellectual curiosity.

Stoppard’s death was reported by his agent.

Stoppard wrote multi-disciplinary plays that touched on a wide range of subjects – ranging from his 1966 absurdist comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead about two minor characters from small village – for his 1993 play arcadia Which included dialogue about Chaos Theory and Garden Landscaping. but when arcadia Opened up in New York, Stoppard told me that his plays were always about people, not abstract ideas.

He said, “I’m not some kind of intellectual who is importing very particular ideas into the unfamiliar territory of theatre. I don’t see it that way at all.” “There’s something about the way plays are written that makes people feel they’re specific to some extent. And there’s a paradox in the context of a specific playwright.”

In 1999, Stoppard won an Oscar for the verbal gymnastics in his screenplay. 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 Tomas Straussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. When he was still a child, 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 he settled in England. His family assimilated, and Stoppard said he did not learn of his Jewish heritage until his 50s.

Stoppard told Jeff Lunden in 2022, “It was a combination of my mother not wanting to look back, on one hand, and liking to talk about the past.”

Stoppard never went to university. At the age of 17, he started working as a journalist. He later became a theater critic and eventually a playwright.

“It’s a strange art, isn’t it?” Stoppard thought during a rehearsal break in 2006. “There’s a lot of people in a big room, they’re watching a few people dress up and talking at one end of the room. And you have 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 maintaining the audience’s attention through his epic nine-hour trilogy, coast of utopiaAbout Russian intellectuals of the 19th century. Movie star Ethan Hawke gave up seven months of more lucrative work to perform coast of utopiaHe said the chance to read Stoppard’s lines was worthwhile,

“We’ve become used to being talked down to. We’ve become used to very simple ideas. We’ve become used to people not challenging us,” Hawke said. “I think the great thing about watching Tom Stoppard is, when you watch it, it makes you feel incredibly intelligent. Because you get it. The ideas aren’t that complicated.”

In 1995, Stoppard said that he loved theater in all its forms.

“Things are either done well or not so well,” he said. “And that’s the only difference that matters in the theater. I think I consider myself somewhere in the category of entertainers. Theater is a popular art. If I didn’t think that way, I’d probably be trying to write some kind of book of essays. I don’t know. I love theater. I’m a theater animal.”

And the theater loved him back. The adjective “Stoppardian” joined the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. This means using elegant wit when addressing philosophical concerns in the style of Tom Stoppard.