Glenn Close, Ethan Hawke and Others Mourn Tom Stoppard

Nobody advanced or cherished the English language more than Stoppard, Tim Curry noted. Colleagues and fans agreed.

Intimidating and charming, and often both at once, Tom Stoppard, whose death was announced on Saturday, was a treasured collaborator to the hundreds of actors, directors and producers who worked on his plays. Here, 13 of them (plus Mick Jagger) try to find words for the man who always had the right ones.

Glenn Close

The actress won her first Tony Award, in 1984, starring in the original Broadway production of Stoppard’s “The Real Thing.”

He was the most elegant man, and I mean that in his thinking, in the way he smoked a cigarette, the way he tied a scarf around his neck, but also the way he thought. He was a giant and a genius. He wrote “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in his 20s, and just to think of that premise is genius. And then “The Coast of Utopia” — God, I love that play.

In a day where our language is getting just ravaged, there’s a reason why great ideas have eloquence. Tom knew, as he said, what order to put the words in so that they actually move you. That’s a rare and incredible gift.

Tim Curry

After starring as Frank-N-Furter in “The Rocky Horror Show,” Curry returned to Broadway as Tristan Tzara in the 1975 original Broadway production of Stoppard’s “Travesties.” They first worked together on Stoppard’s 1975 BBC TV movie “Three Men in a Boat.”

He was the funniest man on the planet. And it’s so extraordinary that English was his second language. Because nobody advanced it more or cherished it more. He could write anything: comedy, tragedy, whatever you like. He was very specific. When you think of it, his choice of subjects were extraordinary. Andy Warhol said that every painter only paints one painting. And I think that can be true of playwrights, but it wasn’t true of him at all. As much as he contributed to the culture, he was as interested in popular culture. He was still a journalist in some ways. He didn’t miss anything.

Ethan Hawke

In 2007, Hawke was nominated for a Tony Award as best featured actor in a play for his performance as the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin in “The Coast of Utopia.”

I worked with Tom Stoppard for almost a year while we rehearsed and performed his play “The Coast of Utopia.” It was the single greatest learning experience of my life. It was as if he took us to the top of Mount Olympus and showed us the view. I believe he spent his life up there. I only spent but a few moments, but I will forever know what “magnificent” looks like.

Billy Crudup

The actor appeared in “Arcadia” twice — as Septimus in 1995 and as Bernard in 2011 — and in 2007 won a Tony Award for his performance as the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky in “The Coast of Utopia.”

When you’re rendering a work, it’s hard to imagine, because a good play feels like it was gifted from heaven, that a person actually wrote it. So to be in a room with Tom forced you to broaden your understanding of your own capacity, and responsibility — which could be intimidating. But there was so much charm in the rigor. During previews for “Arcadia,” when I was trying to understand Septimus as somebody living out his life entertaining himself, he came to me one night and said, “Oh, Billy, I want you to slide a feather between this word and another.” “A feather?” I asked. “Just the slightest breath,” he replied. “Oh, you mean you want me to get a laugh there.” He paused. “No, Billy, I don’t need the laugh. But a laugh is the sound of comprehension.” Which is a good analog to who he was as a person, using his capacity for charm and laughter as an invitation into the heart of his storytelling.

Cynthia Nixon

Nixon performed in two Broadway productions of “The Real Thing,” playing a featured part in the 1984 original production when she was a teenager and then starring in a 2014 Broadway revival.

Tom was always so sweet with me when I was a teenager, and then I got to know him again 30 years later. When I got to know him as an adult, one of the things I loved about Tom was he had so much time for people. His brain was always going a million miles an hour, and I remember asking him questions and watching him consider how he was going to answer — it felt like he had 20 different things he could say, but he always took a breath and thought about how best he wanted to answer the question.

Raúl Esparza

In 2011, Esparza played Valentine Coverly in the Broadway revival of “Arcadia.”

I had seen “Arcadia” on Broadway in my 20s, when I was living in Chicago, and I am such a theater nerd that I went back and read every single one of his plays that I could get my hands on. I felt, with Tom’s writing, that he manages to put into the actor’s mouth the ability to say what seems inexpressible, and rings very true about us — but always with a glimpse of eternity. There are lines from “Arcadia” that have stayed with me for years. The joy that I felt at his wonderful explosion of language was also the joy that I felt that someone is describing how lucky we are to be alive. How magnificent it is to be able to express that with extraordinary intelligence, but also with great humor, and it was that combination of the two that floored me.

Jennifer Ehle

Ehle won two Tony Awards playing four of Stoppard’s women: Annie in “The Real Thing” in 2000 and three roles in “The Coast of Utopia” in 2007.

Speaking his words was a gift — once, literally. We were in previews for “The Coast of Utopia,” the ink still wet on his pen, when he came to me before a performance with a new speech in a sealed envelope. “Don’t open this until after the show,” he said — he didn’t want to mess up what I was going to do that night. What a present! Another time, on a smoke break — and having a smoke break with Tom was one of my favorite things — he said, “I might have told you this before” — and then stopped. “But we hardly ever say anything we haven’t said before.” Except in his plays.

Brandon Uranowitz

In 2023, Uranowitz won the Tony Award for best featured actor in a play for his performance in two roles in “Leopoldstadt.”

Meeting Tom feels like meeting Shakespeare. You want to make him proud. You walk into the room and you have a vision in your mind of this towering figure, and he was literally that too, very tall, but there was also a softness and a warmth to him that was so unexpected. The same for his writing. When I first read “Leopoldstadt” I felt its general wash of brilliance, very heady, very intellectual. I mean, I played a mathematician and had to say lines like “Imagine the cat’s cradle was in the glass box and the string was invisible except for the knots.” It felt intimidating and impossible. But once you break it down sentence by sentence, it feels like there’s no other way to say it. You feel like you’re flying. It all makes sense and you can drop down into the character and the world he inhabits.

Sonia Friedman

Friedman produced Broadway productions of “Leopoldstadt,” “Travesties,” “Arcadia” and “Rock ’n’ Roll.”

We say goodbye to the world’s greatest playwright. Tom transformed the landscape of theater and literature, yet what stayed with you most was his quiet decency. He made you feel special, valued, entirely worth his time — an extraordinary gift from someone whose mind could illuminate the world. We all knew we were standing beside greatness, but he never carried himself like a man who knew it. He wore his brilliance lightly. In a noisy world, Tom listened. And in that listening was its own form of genius.

Jack O’Brien

Best known for directing musicals like “Hairspray,” O’Brien also staged the first New York productions of Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia,” “The Invention of Love,” “Hapgood” and “The Hard Problem.”

I never quite understood how we could be friends. Talk about an odd couple! Without him, wouldn’t I be just a song and dance man? When I look at what he’s achieved, what he was, and the extraordinary list of directors who served his vision, and then I see my name, I think, “Oh that’s not right.” But he allowed me to be unembarrassed by the fact that I wasn’t his match. So many people tried to keep up with him or tilt with him or even prove their worthiness to be the next person to work with him. I never felt that. I had no problem saying, time and time again, as he tried to spoon-feed me quantum mechanics or whatever he was writing about, “I don’t understand that at all.” He’d say: “If you don’t understand it, then I haven’t done it properly. I’ll have to write it better” — which usually meant longer, God help me.

Mick Jagger

André Bishop

During Bishop’s 33-year tenure as the head of Lincoln Center Theater, the playhouse presented five Stoppard plays, including “Arcadia,” “The Invention of Love,” “Hapgood,” “The Hard Problem” and the three-part “The Coast of Utopia.”

Tom Stoppard was one of the greats. He had an English wit and a Slavic soul. We all know he was brilliant but he was something else: thoughtful and kind. A gentleman, dashing and sensitive. His plays were witty and cerebral and playful but underneath you could always find a vividly beating heart and a sadness that came as a surprise and a mark of true genius.

Sam Gold

Gold directed the 2014 Broadway revival of “The Real Thing.”

If an enormous teddy bear could be a genius, then that was what Tom was like. You could ask him about anything, and receive an immense amount of knowledge from him, but he was also very soft-spoken and kind and very warm, and that’s something I didn’t expect until he was actually in the room.

Theater is a medium of language, and that used to be an extremely important and central part of culture — rhetoric and poetry and using language to create meaning. In our contemporary world, words have become devalued, and he is one of the last great rhetorical thinkers that’s been central to culture.

Jason King Jones

Regional and university theaters regularly stage Stoppard’s work, and this year, Jones directed “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, where he is the artistic director.

Stoppard has been one of those writers that has influenced me since I was in college, and like many theater artists I’ve seen as much of his work as I could. I’m really taken with the wrestling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have with what it means to be human, and how to find your own identity in a world that seems a little bit absurd. I didn’t really know what our audience was going to think of this play, honestly, but they were so taken with it — the themes that Stoppard wrote about 60 years ago still resonate so strongly today.

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