Academy Award-Successful Playwright Tom Stoppard Has Died – The Boston Courier

LONDON (AP) — British playwright Tom Stoppard, a playful, probing dramatist who gained an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s “Shakespeare In Love,” has died. He was 88.

In a press release Saturday, United Brokers stated the Czech-born Stoppard — typically hailed as the best British playwright of his technology — died “peacefully” at his residence in Dorset in southwest England, surrounded by his household.

“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,” they stated. “It was an honor to work with Tom and to know him.”

Rolling Stones entrance man Mick Jagger was amongst these paying tribute, calling Stoppard “a giant of the English theater, both highly intellectual and very funny in all his plays and scripts.

“He had a dazzling wit and loved classical and popular music alike which often featured in his huge body of work,” stated Jagger, who produced the 2001 movie “Enigma,” with a screenplay by Stoppard. “He was amusing and quietly sardonic. A friend and companion and I will always miss him.”

King Charles III stated Stoppard was “a dear friend who wore his genius lightly.”

Theaters in London’s West Finish will dim their lights for 2 minutes on Tuesday in tribute.

Over a six-decade profession, Stoppard’s brain-teasing performs for theater, radio and display screen ranged from Shakespeare and science to philosophy and the historic tragedies of the twentieth century.

5 of them gained Tony Awards for greatest play: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1968; “Travesties” in 1976; “The Real Thing” in 1984; “The Coast of Utopia” in 2007; and “Leopoldstadt” in 2023.

Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee stated the key of his performs was their “mixture of language, knowledge and feeling. … It’s those three things in gear together which make him so remarkable.”

The author was born Tomás Sträussler in 1937 to a Jewish household in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. His father was a physician for the Bata shoe firm, and when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939 the household fled to Singapore, the place Bata had a manufacturing facility.

In late 1941, as Japanese forces closed in on the town state, Tomas, his brother and their mom fled once more, this time to India. His father stayed behind and later died when his ship was attacked as he tried to depart Singapore.

In 1946 his mom married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the household moved to threadbare postwar Britain. The 8-year-old Tom “put on Englishness like a coat,” he later stated, rising as much as be a quintessential Englishman who cherished cricket and Shakespeare.

He didn’t go to school however started his profession, aged 17, as a journalist on newspapers in Bristol, southwest England, after which as a theater critic for Scene journal in London.

He wrote performs for radio and tv together with “A Walk on the Water,” televised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which reimagined Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the perspective of two hapless minor characters. A mixture of tragedy and absurdist humor, it premiered on the Edinburgh Fringe Pageant in 1966 and was staged at Britain’s Nationwide Theatre, then run by Laurence Olivier, earlier than shifting to Broadway.

A stream of exuberant, modern performs adopted, together with meta-whodunnit “The Real Inspector Hound” (first staged in 1968); “Jumpers” (1972), a mix of bodily and philosophical gymnastics, and “Travesties” (1974), which set intellectuals together with James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin colliding in Zurich throughout World Conflict I.

Musical drama “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” (1977) was a collaboration with composer Andre Previn a couple of Soviet dissident confined to a psychological establishment — a part of Stoppard’s lengthy involvement with teams advocating for human rights teams within the Soviet Union and Jap Europe.

He typically performed with time and construction. “The Real Thing” (1982) was a poignant romantic comedy about love and deception that featured performs inside a play, whereas “Arcadia” (1993) moved between the fashionable period and the early nineteenth century, the place characters at an English nation home debated poetry, gardening and chaos principle as destiny had its manner with them.

“The Invention of Love” (1997) explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human coronary heart by the lifetime of the English poet A.E. Housman.

Stoppard started the twenty first century with “The Coast of Utopia” (2002), an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, and drew on his personal background for “Rock ’n’ Roll” (2006), which contrasted the fates of the Nineteen Sixties counterculture in Britain and in Communist Czechoslovakia.

“The Hard Problem” (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness by the lenses of science and faith.

Stoppard was a robust champion of free speech who labored with organizations together with PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed to not have sturdy political opinions in any other case, writing in 1968: “I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.”

Some critics discovered his performs extra intelligent than emotionally partaking. However biographer Lee stated his “very funny, witty plays” contained a “sense of underlying grief.”

“People in his plays … history comes at them,” Lee stated at a British Library occasion in 2021. “They turn up, they don’t know why they’re there, they don’t know whether they can get home again.”

That was very true of his late play “Leopoldstadt,” which drew on his family’s story for the story of a Jewish Viennese household over the primary half of the twentieth century. Stoppard stated he started pondering of his private hyperlink to the Holocaust fairly late in life, solely discovering after his mom’s dying in 1996 that many members of his household, together with all 4 grandparents, had died in focus camps.

“It would be misleading to see me as somebody who blithely and innocently, at the age of 40-something, thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family,’” he informed The New Yorker in 2022. “Of course I knew, but I didn’t know who they were. And I didn’t feel I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn’t really true.”

“Leopoldstadt” premiered in London at the beginning of 2020 to rave opinions; weeks later all theaters had been shut by the COVID-19 pandemic. It will definitely opened in Broadway in late 2022, happening to win 4 Tonys.

Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard additionally wrote many radio performs, a novel, tv collection together with “Parade’s End” (2013) and lots of movie screenplays. These included dystopian Terry Gilliam comedy “Brazil” (1985), Steven Spielberg-directed warfare drama “Empire of the Sun” (1987), Elizabethan romcom “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) — for which he and Marc Norman shared a greatest tailored screenplay Oscar — code breaking thriller “Enigma” and Russian epic “Anna Karenina” (2012).

He additionally wrote and directed a 1990 movie adaptation of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” and translated quite a few works into English, together with performs by dissident Czech author Václav Havel, who turned the nation’s first post-Communist president.

Stoppard additionally had a sideline as a Hollywood script physician, lending sparkle to the dialogue of flicks together with “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and the Star Wars movie “Revenge of the Sith.”

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his companies to literature.

He was married 3 times: to Jose Ingle, Miriam Stern — higher generally known as the well being journalist Dr. Miriam Stoppard — and TV producer Sabrina Guinness. The primary two marriages resulted in divorce. He’s survived by 4 youngsters, together with the actor Ed Stoppard, and several other grandchildren.