Sir Tom Stoppard, one of the UK’s best-known playwrights, has died aged 88, his agents said. He “died peacefully at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family”, United Agents announced.
Stoppard won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love. King Charles III and Queen Camilla said they were “deeply saddened” by the death of “one of our greatest writers”, adding: “A dear friend who wore his genius lightly, he could, and did, turn his pen to any subject, challenging, moving and inspiring his audiences, borne from his own personal history.” They offered sympathy to his family and cited his line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
United Agents said he would be remembered “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.”
For more than six decades Stoppard explored philosophical and political themes on stage, screen, radio and television. His notable plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Thing. In 2020 he returned with the semi-autobiographical Leopoldstadt, set in Vienna’s Jewish quarter, which won an Olivier for best new play and later collected four Tony Awards.
He also adapted Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for the 2012 film starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law.
Born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia, his family fled impending Nazi occupation when he was an infant and went to Singapore. His father died in a Japanese prison camp. Stoppard, his mother and brother escaped before the Japanese invasion, travelling to Australia and then India. In India his mother married Major Kenneth Stoppard, and the family later moved to England. He later learned from relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and died in Nazi concentration camps. Reflecting on revisiting his birthplace, he told US magazine Talk in 1999: “I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It’s a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life.”
Stoppard began as a journalist in Bristol in 1954, then worked as a theatre critic and wrote plays for radio and television. Of his early ambitions he told Reuters: “I wanted to be a great journalist. My first ambition was to be lying on the floor of an African airport while machine-gun bullets zoomed over my typewriter. But I wasn’t much use as a reporter. I felt I didn’t have the right to ask people questions. I always thought they’d throw the teapot at me or call the police.”
His breakthrough came in the 1960s when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before moving to the National Theatre and Broadway. The play, which focuses on two minor characters from Hamlet, won several awards, including four Tonys in 1968, among them best play.
Throughout his career he received many honours, including being knighted for services to literature in 1997. The Olivier Awards organisation said West End theatres would dim their lights for two minutes at 19:00 BST on 2 December to remember him. It noted he had won three Olivier Awards and five Tony Awards as well as the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, highlighting the range and enduring impact of his work on stage and screen.
Tributes poured in. Sir Mick Jagger called him his “favourite playwright” and said: “He leaves us with a majestic body of intellectual and amusing work. I will always miss him.” Faber Books described Stoppard as “one of the most brilliant and feted playwrights of the last sixty years and one of the great intellects of our time”, noting his long association with Faber Drama since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Rupert Goold, artistic director of the Almeida Theatre, called Stoppard the “most supportive, most generous man” whose “magic was present in everything he wrote”. London’s Royal Court praised a playwright whose work probed “the deepest human mysteries of truth, time, mortality and frailty while dazzling with wit, laughter and the buoyancy of the human spirit.” Lyricist Sir Tim Rice said he “was in awe of nearly everything” Stoppard did and praised his ability to mix intellectual argument and philosophical thought with wit and fun, predicting many of his plays will endure.
Other tributes included the National Theatre, which said it was “devastated” and called Stoppard a cornerstone of the institution for 50 years; Sean Ono Lennon, who described him as an “absolute genius”; and the Writers’ Guild, which said it was “sad to learn of his death” and noted he had received their outstanding contribution award in 2017.
