Award-winning British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard has died at the age of 88, his talent agency United Agents has confirmed.
Stoppard was widely recognized in the United States for co-writing the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (1998) alongside Marc Norman. Most recently, he earned his fifth Tony Award in 2023 for Leopoldstadt. His first Tony win came in 1968 for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his celebrated, metatheatrical reimagining of Hamlet.
In a statement posted to its website, United Agents said, “We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved client and friend, Tom Stoppard, has died peacefully at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family.
“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,” the statement continued. “It was an honor to work with Tom and to know him.”
Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, now part of the Czech Republic, to a Jewish family that escaped the Nazi invasion in 1939. The family first fleed to Singapore, then to Australia and India. Many members of his extended family were killed in the Holocaust.
After Stoppard's father died when his ship was sunk by Japanese forces off the Singapore coast, his mother later married an Englishman, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family relocated to the United Kingdom, where Tomas took the name Tom Stoppard.
Before finding success in theatre, Stoppard briefly worked as a journalist. Over his prolific career, he produced an extensive body of work that included stage plays, radio dramas, satirical films such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and a range of screen adaptations, including his 2012 version of Anna Karenina and the 1987 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.
“I knew I was – used to be Czech, but I didn’t feel Czech,” Stoppard wrote in a 2024 essay published by the Huntington Theatre company. “I felt about as English as you could get.”
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