Tom Stoppard, Brilliant Playwright and Oscar-Winning Screenwriter, Dead at 88

In addition to his five Tony Awards for Best Play, Stoppard won the Academy Award in in 1998 for "Shakespeare in Love" and was nominated in 1985 for "Brazil."

Tom Stoppard, the brilliant, beloved playwright who won Tonys for writing “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Real Thing,” “Travesties,” “The Coast of Utopia,” and “Leopoldstadt,” has died. He was 88 years old.

Stoppard’s agency, United Agents, announced the news on its website.

“We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved client and friend, Tom Stoppard, has died peacefully at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family,” the post stated. “He 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.  It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him.”

Stoppard was a cherished and acclaimed fixture of theater on both sides of the Atlantic who wrote more than 30 plays across an iconic career, earning three Laurence Olivier Awards for “Arcadia” (1994), “Heroes” (2006), and “Leopoldstadt” (2020). Celebrated for his cerebral writing and savvy, entertaining adaptations of classic works of literature and philosophy, Stoppard was often compared to our greatest dramatists — and not only because his own work built on the likes of William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, and many more. His enduring impact even landed him an adjective all his own in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Stoppardian,” which means “to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns, in the style of Tom Stoppard.”

Stoppard won an Academy Award for “Shakespeare in Love” in 1998 (for Best Original Screenplay, shared with Marc Norman) and secured a nomination for “Brazil” in 1985 (for Best Original Screenplay, shared with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown).

He spent time writing for television in the ’60s and ’70s before working on the screenplays for “Empire of the Sun” and “Brazil” in the ’80s. In 1990, he wrote and directed the adaptation of his own play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, for which he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

He also worked on “The Russia House” starring Sean Connery, “Billy Bathgate” with Nicole Kidman, “Anna Karenina” with Keira Knightley, and “Tulip Fever” with Alicia Vikander in 2017. He returned to television for HBO’s limited series “Parade’s End,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch, in 2012, for which he earned an Emmy nomination.

Stoppard was also a screenwriting fixer, called in to tinker with blockbuster films like “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith,” “Sleepy Hollow,” and “Schindler’s List.”

Born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, Stoppard’s family moved to Singapore to escape the Nazis when he was still a baby. His father died when Stoppard was four years old, while serving as a doctor in the British army, and his mother — after moving to India in 1941 — married a British officer named Kenneth Stoppard. The new family settled in England in 1946, and Stoppard didn’t learn of his Jewish heritage until he was in his 50s.

Stoppard never attended university and started working as a journalist and writing radio plays before he was 20. He wrote theater reviews under a pseudonym when he moved to London, and started writing his own stage plays after moving to Berlin with a grant from the Ford Foundation. An insatiable reader, Stoppard died at his home in Dorset, England.