Tom Stoppard, the playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter of Shakespeare In Love, has died aged 88.
The Czech-born UK writer’s credits also included co-writing Brazil with director Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, for which he was nominated for an Oscar in 1986, adapting John le Carre‘s novel The Russia House for Fred Schepisi’s 1990 film and adapting Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina for Joe Wright’s 2012 feature.
Stoppard received five Tony awards for his plays and won the Oscar and Golden Globe awards in 1999 for John Madden’s Shakespeare In Love.
He was also known in Hollywood as a script doctor, with uncredited revisions to films including Steven Spielberg’s 1989 Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.
Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia. His Jewish family escaped the imminent Nazi occupation and fled to Singapore, where his father died in a Japanese prison camp. Stoppard and his mother and brother moved to India, before resettling in the UK with his mother’s new husband, a British army officer.
He began his writing career as a journalist at the Western Daily Press in Bristol, which exposed him to the Bristol Old Vic theatre. Stoppard’s first stage play, A Walk On The Water (later retitled Enter A Free Man), was broadcast on ITV in 1963.
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead was his breakthrough work, taking him to the London’s National Theatre in 1967. He later directed the film version of his play, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1990, and starred Tim Roth and Gary Oldman.
“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,” said his representatives at United Agents.
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