Tom Stoppard's Works Displayed Intellect, Wit

Tom Stoppard, a playwright who won five Tony Awards and an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love while mixing clever wordplay with philosophic depth, has died. He was 88. Stoppard died at his home in Dorset, England, his agents announced, per the Hollywood Reporter. They called him a writer with "brilliance and humanity" and "a profound love of the English language." Publisher Faber Books said Stoppard was "one of the most brilliant and feted playwrights of the last sixty years and one of the great intellects of our time," per the BBC. "He leaves us with a majestic body of intellectual and amusing work," Mick Jagger posted.

Born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, Stoppard fled the Nazis with his family as a child to Singapore. When Japanese forces invaded the country three years later, Stoppard, his mother, and his brother went to Australia, then India, eventually settling in India. His father had stayed behind in Singapore and was killed. He became Tom Stoppard when his mother married British army Maj. Kenneth Stoppard in 1946. Before turning to playwriting and screenwriting, Stoppard worked as a newspaper reporter in Bristol, where he started regularly going to the theater.

The playwright's breakout came with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966, which reimagined Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters. The play, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, earned Stoppard his first Tony and established his reputation for intellectual wordplay and humor. The usually confused characters happen into deeper but amusing thoughts at times, per the Washington Post, as in Rosencrantz's contemplation: "Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?" Stoppard also wrote and directed a 1990 film version, per the New York Times.

He would go on to win additional Tonys for Travesties, The Real Thing, The Coast of Utopia, and Leopoldstadt. His screenwriting credits include Brazil, The Russia House, and uncredited work on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with director Steven Spielberg crediting Stoppard for much of the film's dialogue, per the reporter. Stoppard was knighted in 1997. "Some writers write because they burn with a cause which they further by writing about it," Stoppard wrote in 1968 in The Sunday Times of London. "I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really."