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Yes, I know that headline may come off as irreverent if not downright cheeky. I like to think that the writer who first came to prominence with his 1966 stageplay Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead would appreciate it. Tony- and Oscar-winning author Tom Stoppard, who passed away last week at 88, was a master of finding truth and humor in absurdist settings.
Born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, he and his family would have to flee from the horrors of World War II twice: leaving their homeland following the Nazi occupation in 1939 for Singapore, then escaping to colonial India in the wake of a Japanese invasion. Tomáš’s father stayed in Singapore and was later killed trying to escape. His mother remarried a British army officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England in 1946.
Eschewing going to university for a newspaper job in Bristol, Stoppard became a drama critic and colminist. While there he befriended two members of the city’s Old Vic theatre company: John Boorman and Peter O’Toole. Tom switched to playwriting, working on original dramas and TV dramas. A Shakespearean send-up he worked on while staying at a German mansion eventually became the 1968 Tony Award winner Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which explored the backstory of two minor characters from Hamlet. Stoppard would take home Broadway’s biggest prize four more times, for Travesties (1976), The Real Thing (1984), The Coast of Utopia (2oo7), and his final play, Leopoldstadt (2023).
This, of course, is a movie blog. Fortunately for us, Stoppard also devoted much of his time and talent to writing for the movies. His first screenplay was in tandem with author Thomas Wiseman on 1975’s The Romantic Englishwoman, based on Wiseman’s novel. Stoppard worked with German auteur R.W. Fassbinder’s screen version of the Nabokov novel Despair (1978). The following year came an adaptation of Graham Greene’s espionage thriller The Human Factor for director Otto Preminger. Tom collaborated with Charles McKeown and director Terry Gilliam on the Monty Python alum’s 1985 dystopian epic Brazil, and in 1987 wrote the screenplay for Steve Spielberg’s WWII saga Empire of the Sun, based on J.G. Ballard’s novel. He and Spielberg reunited when he worked on the final scipt for 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
1990 found Stoppard adapting the John Le Carre spy novel The Russia House for director Fred Schepisi and stars Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. That same year he tried his hand at directing with the film translation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in the title roles. And while there were gasps at the 1999 Academy Awards when Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture, few complained when Stoppard and Marc Norman took home Best Original Screenplay statues for the Elizabethan romcom.
Among the author’s later cinematic projects were Michael Apted’s WWII codebreaking drama Enigma (2001); uncredited dialogue work on Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005); 2012’s lush iteration of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law; and his final big screen credit, the 2014 historical romance Tulip Fever. He lived long enough to see his surname become part of the language he used so masterfully. The Oxford English Dictionary added the adjective “Stoppardian”–to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns–in 1978. Stoppard died at his home in the coastal Dorset region of England on November 29.