Tom Stoppard

Born Tomáš Sträussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard fled with his family ahead of the Nazi occupation, first to Singapore and then, after the Japanese invasion, to India, where he spent three years at a boarding school in Darjeeling. His father, Eugen Sträussler, a company doctor for the Bata shoe firm, was killed during the evacuation of Singapore; his mother remarried Major Kenneth Stoppard, a British Army officer, and the family settled in England in 1946. Stoppard left school at seventeen to become a journalist in Bristol, where he began reviewing plays and writing his own. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), which reimagined Hamlet from the bewildered perspective of two minor courtiers caught in someone else’s tragedy, was performed by the Oxford Theatre Group at the Edinburgh Fringe and then transferred to the National Theatre, making Stoppard famous at twenty-nine. The play’s dazzling fusion of existential comedy and literary pastiche established the mode he would refine across decades: Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993) , widely considered his masterpiece, an intellectual romance braiding thermodynamics, landscape gardening, Byron scholarship, and chaos theory across two time periods , and The Coast of Utopia (2002), a trilogy spanning the lives of nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals. He also co-wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (1998), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. He was knighted in 1997 and awarded the Order of Merit in 2000. Stoppard died on November 29, 2025, in London, at the age of eighty-eight.

In 1993, a cousin he had never met arrived at the National Theatre with a hand-drawn family tree. Reading the names, Stoppard asked what happened to each relative. The answer, again and again, was Auschwitz. He had been raised in England knowing nothing of his Jewish family, or that nearly all of them had died in the camps.