<div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>British playwright Tom Stoppard, a playful, probing dramatist who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s “Shakespeare In Love,” has died. He was 88.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>In a statement yesterday, United Agents said Stoppard died “peacefully” at his home in Dorset in southern England, surrounded by his family.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>“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,” they said. “It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him.”</span></div></div><div><div id="adspot-mobile-medium"></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><strong><span>READ MORE: </span></strong><a href="https://www.9news.com.au/world/hong-kong-fire-grateful-to-be-alive-residents-who-escaped-the-hong-kong-apartment-blaze-wonder-what-comes-next/7e973800-425d-4f0e-87ee-1ff9ffdd17b8" rel="" target="_blank" title=""><strong><span>Survivor's incredible story from inside the Hong Kong horror blaze</span></strong></a></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>The Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was garlanded with honours, including a shelf full of theatre awards.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Tributes flowed in after news of his death, including from Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones who described Stoppard as his favourite playwright.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>“He leaves us with a majestic body of intellectual and amusing work,” he said on X alongside three photos.</span></div></div><div><div class="OUTBRAIN" data-reactroot="" data-src="//www.9news.com.au/world/tom-stoppard-dead-88-british-playwright-academy-award-shakespeare-in-love/be6ecb57-d622-4315-b1ee-467caf723d24" data-widget-id="AR_5"></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Theatres in London’s West End will dim their lights for two minutes at 7 p.m. local time on Tuesday in recognition of Stoppard.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Over a career that spanned six decades, Stoppard's brain-teasing plays for theatre, radio and screen ranged from Shakespeare and science to philosophy and the historic tragedies of the 20th century.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Five of them won Tony Awards for best play: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1968; “Travesties” in 1976; “The Real Thing” in 1984; “The Coast of Utopia” in 2007; and “Leopoldstadt” in 2023.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was their “mixture of language, knowledge and feeling. … It’s those three things in gear together which make him so remarkable.”</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>The writer was born Tomás Sträussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. His father was a doctor for the Bata shoe company, and when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939 the family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>In late 1941, as Japanese forces closed in on the city state, Tomas, his brother and their mother fled again, this time to India. His father stayed behind and later died when his ship was attacked as he tried to leave Singapore.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>In 1946 his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to threadbare post-war Britain. The 8-year-old Tom “put on Englishness like a coat,” he later said, growing up to be a quintessential Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>He did not go to university but began his career, aged 17, as a journalist on newspapers in Bristol, southwest England, and then as a theatre critic for Scene magazine in London.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><strong><span>READ MORE: </span></strong><a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/anthony-albanese-jodie-haydon-wedding-the-ldoge/dfe91d8f-803c-4a01-b82f-20ef488b1c58" rel="" target="_blank" title=""><strong><span>Anthony Albanese marries Jodie Haydon in private ceremony at The Lodge</span></strong></a></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>He wrote plays for radio and television including “A Walk on the Water,” televised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which reimagined Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the viewpoint of two hapless minor characters. A mix of tragedy and absurdist humour, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was staged at Britain’s National Theatre, then run by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>A stream of exuberant, innovative plays followed, including meta-whodunnit “The Real Inspector Hound” (first staged in 1968); “Jumpers” (1972), a blend of physical and philosophical gymnastics, and “Travesties” (1974), which set intellectuals including James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin colliding in Zurich during World War I.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Musical drama “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” (1977) was a collaboration with composer Andre Previn about a Soviet dissident confined to a mental institution — part of Stoppard’s long involvement with groups advocating for human rights groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>He often played with time and structure. “The Real Thing” (1982) was a poignant romantic comedy about love and deception that featured plays within a play, while “Arcadia” (1993) moved between the modern era and the early 19th century, where characters at an English country house debated poetry, gardening and chaos theory as fate had its way with them.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>“The Invention of Love” (1997) explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of the English poet A.E. Housman.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Stoppard began the 21st century with “The Coast of Utopia” (2002), an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, and drew on his own background for “Rock’n’roll” (2006), which contrasted the fates of the 1960s counterculture in Britain and in Communist Czechoslovakia.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>“The Hard Problem” (2015) explored the mysteries of consciousness through the lenses of science and religion.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Stoppard was a strong champion of free speech who worked with organisations including PEN and Index on Censorship. He claimed not to have strong political views otherwise, writing in 1968: “I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.”</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Some critics found his plays more clever than emotionally engaging. But biographer Lee said many of his plays contained a “sense of underlying grief.”</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><strong><span>READ MORE: </span></strong><a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/cloverdale-fire-uber-driver-stops-ride-to-run-into-burning-house-missing-dog/64a7c7de-cf65-4f1b-849a-a5e000fe84a3" rel="" target="_blank" title=""><strong><span>Hero Uber driver stops job to race into burning house</span></strong></a></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>“People in his plays … history comes at them,” Lee said at a British Library event in 2021. “They turn up, they don’t know why they’re there, they don’t know whether they can get home again. They’re often in exile, they can barely remember their own name. They may have been wrongfully incarcerated. They may have some terrible moral dilemma they don’t know how to solve. They may have lost someone. And over and over again I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny, witty plays.”</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>That was especially true of his late play “Leopoldstadt,” which drew on his own family’s story for the tale of a Jewish Viennese family over the first half of the 20th century. Stoppard said he began thinking of his personal link to the Holocaust quite late in life, only discovering after his mother’s death in 1996 that many members of his family, including all four grandparents, had died in concentration camps.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>“I wouldn’t have written about my heritage — that’s the word for it nowadays — while my mother was alive, because she’d always avoided getting into it herself,” Stoppard told The New Yorker in 2022.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>“It would be misleading to see me as somebody who blithely and innocently, at the age of 40-something, thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family,’” he said “Of course I knew, but I didn’t know who they were. And I didn’t feel I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn’t really true.”</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>“Leopoldstadt” premiered in London at the start of 2020 to rave reviews; weeks later all theaters were shut by the COVID-19 pandemic. It eventually opened in Broadway in late 2022, going on to win four Tonys.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard also wrote many radio plays, a novel, television series including “Parade’s End” (2013) and many film screenplays. These included dystopian Terry Gilliam comedy “Brazil” (1985), Steven Spielberg-directed war drama “Empire of the Sun” (1987), Elizabethan romcom “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) — for which he and Marc Norman shared a best adapted screenplay Oscar — code breaking thriller “Enigma” (2001) and Russian epic “Anna Karenina” (2012).</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>He also wrote and directed a 1990 film adaptation of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” and translated numerous works into English, including plays by dissident Czech writer Václav Havel, who became the country’s first post-Communist president.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his services to literature.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>He was married three times: to Jose Ingle, Miriam Stern — better known as the health journalist Dr. Miriam Stoppard — and TV producer Sabrina Guinness. The first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by four children, including the actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/how-to-follow-9news-digital/29855bb1-ad3d-4c38-bc25-3cb52af1216f"><em><strong><span>DOWNLOAD THE 9NEWS APP</span></strong></em></a><em><strong><span>: Stay across all the latest in breaking news, sport, politics and the weather via our news app and get notifications sent straight to your smartphone. 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