Tom Stoppard, the playwright whose dazzling wordplay and inventive structures reshaped British theatre for more than half a century, has died at home in Dorset at 88, his agent said on Saturday. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.
Stoppard first achieved fame with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the 1966 breakout that flipped Shakespeare on its head and turned a young, little-known writer into a global sensation. It quickly moved from the Edinburgh Fringe to the National Theatre and on to Broadway.
Stage, film and radio
Over the following decades, Stoppard's work spanned stage, film and radio, exploring subjects from mathematics and chaos theory to journalism and Jewish identity. His final play, Leopoldstadt (2020), drew on his rediscovery of his own family's history and the loss of Jewish relatives in the Holocaust.
Across his career, he collected a record five Tony Awards for Best Play, an Oscar for co-writing Shakespeare in Love, and a knighthood. His influence even entered the dictionary: "Stoppardian" came to describe his distinctive blend of intellectual playfulness and emotional undercurrent.
Born Tomas Straussler in 1937 in what is now the Czech Republic, he fled the Nazis as a child, later settling in Britain, where he began as a journalist before turning to theatre. Stoppard's went from cub reporter to one of Britain's most acclaimed dramatists. He is survived by his wife, Sabrina Guinness, and his four sons.