Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard was born to a Jewish family in the Czech city of Zlín in 1937. Two years later, his parents fled the country with him to escape the Nazi occupation. They moved to Singapore, where his father died as a Japanese prisoner of war, and then to Darjeeling, India, where he attended an American boarding school and his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, an English army officer. (This is how his name changed from Tomáš Sträussler, his birth name, to Tom Stoppard.) He moved to England with his family at age 10 and continued his education in Yorkshire. But he quit school at age 17 to become a journalist and never went to college. For a decade, Stoppard worked as a reporter and theatre critic, befriending actors and directors until he started writing plays of his own. His first play, A Walk on the Water, was an instant hit in 1962, and two years later, he published Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which remains his best-known work today. In the more than five decades since, he has written around three dozen stage plays and nearly as many major screenplays (including many adaptations from novels, the Academy Award winner Shakespeare in Love, and even parts of the third Star Wars movie). Between 1968 and 2020, he won seven Tony Awards and Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Play. (As of 2022, he is tied for the most Tony Award wins for writing.) He has also translated numerous plays from throughout Europe into English—most notably those of the Czech writer, activist, and eventual president Václav Havel. After communist rule ended in the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the early 1990s, Stoppard finally returned to his birthplace of Zlín and learned, tragically, that his grandparents and his mother’s three sisters were all murdered in Nazi concentration camps. He was knighted in 1997 and remains one of Britain’s most highly regarded playwrights today.