Legendary playwright dies aged 88

Australian author Kathy Lette described Stoppard as one of the wittiest people she had ever met.

“One conversation with him left you reeling from irreverent and creative humor,” he shared.

While Stoppard was reaching the heights of English literature, he was born into a Czech family in 1937 and spent the early years of his life in what was then Czechoslovakia before escaping with his family to Singapore and India.

After her father died in Singapore in 1942, her mother Martha married British officer Kenneth Stoppard and moved the family to England in 1946.

Describing himself as a “jumping Czech,” Stoppard only learned of his family’s Jewish heritage late in life and discovered that all four of his grandparents had died in the Holocaust. He grew up an English boy with his brother, and his mother tells little about his early life.

The exploration of his family history led him to write his most personal play, “Leopoldstadt,” which was first performed in 2020 and tells the story of a Jewish family in Vienna in the first half of the 20th century.

While he started his working life as a journalist in Bristol in his late teens, he developed an interest in theater and began writing plays for radio and television.

His breakthrough came in 1963, when his first major stage play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” filled theaters by using some of Shakespeare’s dialogue to create a comic drama out of two minor characters from “Hamlet.”

He combined history, philosophy and comedy in a series of plays, including 1974’s “Transvestites,” in which he brought together historical figures such as James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin during World War I.

“Arcadia,” first performed in 1993, combined science and mathematics in a drama about a teenager named Thomasina Coverly growing up in 1809 and the rediscovery of her life more than a century later.

His film credits included Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” and the screenplay for Terry Gilliam’s cult classic “Brazil,” but he did not always seek public recognition for his work.

When Spielberg brought in Stoppard to complete “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” the playwright worked under the pseudonym Barry Watson and added comic touches to the result. Spielberg is said to have stated that every line of dialogue in the film came from Stoppard.

His work “Shakespeare in Love,” based on the idea that the Elizabethan playwright experienced writer’s block while trying to perform the play “Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter,” created the most successful film about the literary giant.

A character in the play “The Real Thing”, first staged in 1982, summarizes his writing life.

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect,” Henry says.

“If you put the right things in the right order, you can give the world a little nudge or create a poem that the children will speak for you when you die.”