Australian writer Kathy Lette described Stoppard as one of the wittiest people she had ever met.
“A conversation with him left you reeling from irreverent and imaginative quip-lash,” she posted.
While Stoppard rose to the heights of English literature, he was born to Czech parents in 1937 and spent his early life in what was then Czechoslovakia before fleeing with his family to Singapore and India.
Stoppard in 2023 with the Tony award for best play for Leopoldstadt.Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
After his father died in Singapore in 1942, his mother, Martha, married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and moved the family to England in 1946.
Stoppard, who described himself as a “bounced Czech”, only learnt of his family’s Jewish heritage late in life – and discovered that all four of his grandparents had died in the Holocaust. He was raised with his brother as an English boy and told little about his mother’s early life.
The exploration of his family history led him to write his most personal play, Leopoldstadt, which was first performed in 2020 and told the story of a Jewish family in Vienna over the first half of the 20th century.
While he began his working life as a journalist in Bristol in his late teenage years, he was drawn to the theatre and began by writing plays for radio and television.
Stoppard’s breakthrough came with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
His breakthrough came in 1963 when his first major stage play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, packed theatres by creating a comic drama out of two of the minor characters in Hamlet – using some of Shakespeare’s dialogue.
He combined history, philosophy and comedy in a series of plays, including Travesties in 1974, in which he created a meeting between historical figures such as James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin during the First World War.
Arcadia, first performed in 1993, combined science and mathematics in a drama about a teenager, Thomasina Coverly, growing up in 1809, and the rediscovery of her life more than a century later.
His movie work included the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun and Terry Gilliam’s cult classic Brazil, but he did not always seek a public credit for his work.
When Spielberg called Stoppard in to complete Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the playwright worked with the pen name Barry Watson and added comic touches to the result. Spielberg is said to have remarked that every line of dialogue in the film came from Stoppard.
His work on Shakespeare in Love created the most successful film about the literary giant, based on the notion that the Elizabethan playwright was dogged by writer’s block while attempting a play called “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter”.
In one play, The Real Thing, first performed in 1982, a character, Henry, sums up the writing life: “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect.
“If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”
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