Tom Stoppard

At 87 years old, Tom Stoppard has this physical status:

Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tom Straussler; 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter.

He has written regularly for television, radio, film, and stage, winning a following for his writing with titles including Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Invention of Love, The Invention of Love, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russian House, and Shakespeare in Love, as well as numerous Tony Awards.

His essays explore the philosophical thematics of society. Human rights, censorship, and political liberty are common themes in his work.

Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the finest internationally performed dramatists of his generation.

The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 on their list of the "100 most influential people in British culture" in 2008.

He and his family returned to the United Kingdom after the war in 1946, having attended three years (1943-1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling, India's Himalayas.

Stoppard became a writer, a drama critic, and then, in 1960, a playwright. In June 2019, it was revealed that he had written Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early twentieth century Vienna, which would premiere in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre with Patrick Marber directing.

Early life and education

In Zln, a city dominated by the shoe industry in Moravia, Czechoslovakia's Moravia region, Stoppard was born Tomássler. He is the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Sträussler, a Bata shoe company doctor. His parents were not religious Jews. Right before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the town's patron, Jan Antonn Baa, moved his Jewish employees, mainly physicians, to branches of his company outside Europe. The Sträussler family returned to Singapore, where Baa had a factory. On March 15, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Sträussler family fled to Singapore.

Stoppard, his brother, and their mother fled to India before the Japanese took over Singapore. Stoppard's father remained in Singapore as a British army soldier, knowing that as a doctor, he would be needed in the defense. When Stoppard was four years old, his father died. Sträussler had died in Japanese captivity as a war prisoner, according to the author. The book by Tom Stoppard in Conversation describes this, but the author later revealed that his father died on board a ship that had been bombed by Japanese forces when he attempted to evacuate Singapore in 1942.

In 1941, when Toma was five, he, his brother, and their mother were evacuated to Darjeeling, India. The boys attended Mount Hermon School, an American multi-racial academy, where Tom and his brother Petr became Peter.

Martha Stoppard, a British army major who gave the children his English surname and relocated the family to England in 1946, married him in 1945. "To be born an Englishman was to have drawn the first prize in the lottery of life," his 9-year-old stepson said, "Don't you know that I made you British?" Starting Stoppard's aspiration as a child to become "an honourable Englishman." "I'm often with people who forget that I don't really belong in the world we live in," he said. I believe I've got a foot wrong—it could be pronunciation, an arcane piece of English history—and now I'm naked, without a ticket or a newspaper ticket. His characters, he claims, are "constantly being addressed by the wrong name," with jokes and false trails to do with the confusion of having two names. Stoppard began his studies at Pocklington School in East Riding, Yorkshire, which he feared.

Stoppard left school at the age of 17 and began working as a reporter for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, without attending university. Years later, he regretted his decision not to pursue a university education, but at the time, he loved his work as a writer and was passionate about his work as a journalist. He worked at the paper from 1954 to 1958, when Bristol Evening World offered Stoppard the position of feature writer, humor columnist, and secondary drama critic, which took him into the world of theater. Stoppard, a well-known regional repertory firm at the time, formed friendships with director John Boorman and actor Peter O'Toole early in their careers. He became well-known in Bristol for his strained attempts at humor and untylish clothing more than for his writing.

Personal life

Stoppard has been married three times. Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a nurse, was his first marriage; his second marriage was to Miriam Stern (1972–92). They broke up after he began a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He also had a friendship with actress Sinéad Cusack, but she made it clear she wanted to stay married to Jeremy Irons and keep close to their two sons. Also, after being reunited with a son she had given up for adoption, she wanted to spend time with him in Dublin rather than with Stoppard in the house she shared in France. Oliver Stoppard, Barnaby Stoppard, the actor Ed Stoppard, and Will Stoppard, who is married to violinist Linzi Stoppard, have two sons from each of his first two marriages. Sabrina Guinness married him in 2014.

In 1996, Stoppard's mother died. The family had not discussed their history, and no one brother knew what had happened to the family's remains in Czechoslovakia. Stoppard and three of his mother's siblings discovered that all four of his grandparents were Jewish and died in Terezin, Auschwitz, and other camps in the early 1990s, shortly after communism's demise.

For the first time in more than 50 years, he returned to Zln in 1998 following the deaths of his parents. He has expressed grief for a missing father and a missing past, but there is no hint of being a survivor, at any angle. "I feel extremely fortunate not to have been forced to live or die." It's a prominent part of what could be described as a "mischievous life."

Stoppard asked Hermione Lee to write his biography in 2013. In 2020, the book was released.

Stoppard told Paul Delaney in 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher's resignation: "I'm a conservative with a tiny c." Stoppard referred to himself as a "timid libertarian" in 2007.

The Tom Stoppard Prize (Czech: Cena Toma Stopparda) was established in 1983 under the Charter 77 Foundation and is given to writers of Czech origins.

Stoppard, Kevin Spacey, Jude Law, and others, joined demonstrations against Alexander Lukashenko's regime in March 2011, indicating their support for the Belarusian democracy movement.

Stoppard's public endorsement of "Hacked Off" and its movement towards press self-regulation in 2014 "safeguarding the public from political interference while still providing crucial protection to the homeless."

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Career

Stoppard produced short radio plays from 1953 to 1960, and by 1960, he had produced A Walk on the Water, which was later re-titled Enter a Free Man (1968). He has said that the work owed a lot to Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Stoppard was sent a week after delivering A Walk on the Water to an agent, and he got his version of the "Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists' lives." His first performance was optioned, staged in Hamburg, and then broadcast on British Independent Television in 1963. Stoppard served in London from September 1962 to April 1963, writing essays and interviews under his name and pseudonym William Boot (taken from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop). Stoppard spent 5 months in a Berlin mansion in 1964, after he began with a one-act play entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, which later evolved into his Tony-winning play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Stoppard continued to produce many works for radio, television, and theatre, including "M" for Moon Among Other Things (1964), A Separate Peace (1966), and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (1966). The opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in a National Theatre performance at the Old Vic on Tuesday, 1967, following acclaim at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival. Jumpers (1972) places a professor of moral philosophy in a murder mystery thriller alongside a slew of radical gymnasts. Travesties (1974) investigated the 'Wildean' possibilities as a result of the fact that Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara had all been in Zürich during the First World War. Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), set in contemporary London, Stoppard has written one book. Its cast includes the 18th-century figure of the dandified Malquist and his ineffective Boswell, Moon, cowboys, a lion (banned from the Ritz), and a donkey-borne Irishman claiming to be the Risen Christ.

Stoppard translated several plays into English in the 1980s, including works by Sáwomir Mroek, Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler, and Václav Havel. Stoppard's work was influenced by Polish and Czech absurdist artists at this time. He has been co-opted into the Outrapo group, a far-from-serious French movement that seeks to develop actors' stage technique by science.

Stoppard's The Real Thing, a 1982 playwright, premiered his performance. The story revolves around a male-female relationship and the fight between the actress and the founder of a group attempting to free a Scottish soldier detained for lighting a memorial wreath during a resistance. Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal created the leading roles. The tale explores various aspects of honesty, from a play within a play to an examination of appearances to reality versus appearance. "It's one of Stoppard's most famous, enduring, and autobiographical plays," the film has been described as one of "Stoppard's most famous, enduring, and autobiographical plays."

The play made its Broadway debut in 1984, starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close in the leading roles with a supporting role played by Christine Baranski. "The Broadway version of The Real Thing, a major update to the original London production, is not only Mr. Stoppard's most moving play but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years," says theatre critic Frank Rich. The project went on to win seven Tony Award nominations for Best Play as well as for Nichols, Irons, Close, and Baranski. This will be Stoppard's third Tony Award for Best Play, after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968, and Travesties in 1976.

Stoppard co-wrote with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown in 1985, the satirical science-fiction dark comedy Brazill (1985). The film received near-universal praise. "Visually, it's an original, bravura piece of moviemaking," Pauline Kael's reviewer said, "Gilliam's vision is an organic thing on the screen—and that's a huge achievement." Stoppard, as well as Gilliam and McKeown, had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay Losing to Witness. He continued to write scripts for Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). "He was responsible for virtually every line of dialogue in the film," Spielberg later revealed that although Stoppard was uncredited for the latter of the two films.

Stoppard wrote Arcadia, a play in which he investigates the relationship between two modern academics and the people of a Derbyshire country house in the early 19th century, including aristocrats, tutors, and Lord Byron's fleeting presence on stage in 1993. The play's main characters include philosophical aspects of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature, and the English picturesque style of garden design.

Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendal, Bill Nighy, and Harriet Walter appeared in the first production at the Royal National Theatre directed by Trevor Nunn. It received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 1993. Billy Crudup, Victor Garber, and Robert Sean Leonard appeared in the play a year after it premiered on Broadway. Although "real difficulties surround this production," Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "there are] also wonderful pleasures, not the least of which are Mark Thompson's sets and costumes." Mr. Stoppard's grandly eclectic obsessions and his singular gifts as a playwright are, however, mainly. "They should come to them." The show received three Tony Award nominations, including Best Play to Terrence McNally's Love!

Valour!

Compassion!

Stoppard's feature film Shakespeare in Love (1998), which he wrote, received acclaim. The film, which is a romantic comedy, focuses on William Shakespeare's fictional life and his love with a young woman who is a source for Romeo and Juliet. Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, Colin Firth, and Dame Judi Dench were among the ensemble cast members of the film. The film was a critical and financial success, and it went on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Stoppard earned his second consecutive Academy Award and first for Best Original Screenplay. He also received the BAFTA Award and the Golden Globe Award for his screenplay.

The Coast of Utopia (2004) was a trilogy of plays by Stoppard, who explored the philosophical beliefs of Russian revolutionary figures in the late nineteenth century. Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage are included in the trilogy. Michael Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev, and Alexander Herzen are among the play's key actors. The title comes from a chapter in Avrahm Yarmolinsky's book Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (1959). In 2002, Trevor Nunn's play premiered in the National Theatre, spanning nine hours. The play received three Laurence Olivier Award nominations, including Best New Play, but it lost in all its categories. In 2006, the company made its Broadway debut in a production starring Billy Crudup, Jennifer Ehle, and Ethan Hawke. The show received ten nominations, one for Best Play, Stoppard's fourth appearance in the category.

In both Cambridge, England, and Prague, Rock 'n' Roll (2006) was on display. The play explored the culture of 1960s rock music, particularly Syd Barrett and the Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe, mirroring the gap between liberal society in England and the Communist Czech state after the Warsaw Pact intervention in Prague.

Stoppard served on the board of directors of Standpoint magazine and was instrumental in its establishment, giving the inaugural address at the publication's unveiling. He is also a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that encourages schoolchildren around the United Kingdom to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres. Stoppard was elected president of the London Library in 2002 and vice president in 2017, following Sir Tim Rice's election as president in 2017.

Stoppard converted Anna Karenina of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina into the 2012 film version starring Keira Knightley. "Stoppard, the film's creator of bouncing characters in fine plays, including Arcadia, delivers an exceptionally clean, delicately balanced script," film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote for Entertainment Weekly.

Stoppard created a five-part limited series named Parade's Conclusion in 2013, which revolves around a love triangle between a conservative English aristocrat, his suffrageous wife, and a young suffragette. Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall appear in the series. Critics with the Independent's Grace Dent have praised the series as "one of the finest things the BBC has ever made." "Parade's Conclusion is a wonderful achievement, as well as smart, mature television," IndieWire reported. The series received a British Academy Television Award and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the series.

Stoppard had written Leopoldstadt, a new play set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna, which was announced in June 2019. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play went on to be named by the play's winner. With an opening scheduled for 2 October 2022, the play has now been staged in Broadway.

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