British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard He died this Saturday at the age of 88 surrounded by his family at his home in Dorset, southern England, according to reports. United Agents.
Known in the theater world for works such as The Real Thing y Leopoldstadt, received a Oscar and a Golden Globe for the film’s script Shakespeare In Love in 1998
“What is it about?” was the frequent response of the bewildered spectators before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, the first theatrical triumph of Tom Stoppard .
Tired of being asked, it is said that Stoppard he responded to a woman outside a theater on Broadway: “This will make me very rich.”
He later questioned whether he had said “a lot,” writes Hermione Lee in her authorized biography. Stoppardbut he had undoubtedly managed to transform his until then precarious finances.
For every bewildered viewer, there were many more ecstatic fans and critics, dazzled by the wit, brilliant wordplay and sheer audacity of a young playwright who had turned to shakespeare and had placed the focus, not on the eponymous Hamlet, but on two minor characters in the same play.
Premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966, the following year, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead turned to Stoppardat 29 years old, in the youngest playwright to be presented at the National Theater in London.
From there, the play moved to Broadway and had more than 250 productions around the world during its first decade.
Stoppard’s road flourished for decades more, covering theater, film and radio, and demonstrating his thirst to tackle any topic, from mathematics to Dada art to landscape gardening.
His last work, Leopoldstadt, Released in 2020, it follows the story of a Jewish family in Vienna inspired by their own history.
Many more Stoppard successes include The Real Inspector Hound, which parodied theatrical detective novels and mocked theater critics, Jumpersa 1.5 million word epic that delighted and confounded its audience, and Night and Daya satire of the British media.
His works, dense and intricately constructed, were based on extensive research. Arcadia, from 1993, considered by many critics to be his masterpiece, fused chaos theory, Isaac Newton and the love life of the poet Lord Byron.
The term Stoppard ian, first registered in 1978, joined the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to the use of verbal devices when addressing philosophical concepts.
His honors, both at home and abroad, include an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay for the 1998 hit film “Shakespeare in Love” and a record five Tony Awards for best play. In 1997, he was knighted for his contribution to theatre.
“Incredibly lucky”
Stoppard was born with the name Tom and Straussler on July 3, 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, son of Eugen Straussler, a doctor, and Marta (or Martha), née Beckova, who had trained as a nurse.
The Jewish family fled the Nazis and moved to Singapore when he was a baby. Singapore, in turn, became unsafe. With his mother and older brother, Peter, he escaped to India. His father stayed behind and died while fleeing after the fall of Singapore to Japanese hands. In India, Marta Straussler married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard and the family moved to England.
He then entered a boarding school in Pocklington, in Yorkshire, in the north of England, where Tom Stoppard he loved cricket more than the theater and learned to be British, which the eldest Stoppard considered the nationality par excellence.
He Stoppard An adult, who decades later rediscovered the Jewish roots he explored in his last work, would accuse his stepfather of “an innate anti-Semitism.”
He eventually learned from his Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents were Jewish and had died in Nazi concentration camps.
“I feel incredibly lucky that I did not have to survive or die. It is a remarkable part of what could be called a charmed life,” he wrote in Talk, an American magazine, in 1999, reflecting on his return with his brother to their hometown, Zlin, in what is now the Czech Republic.
“Intellect and emotion are bedfellows”
Despite demonstrating academic prowess in school, Stoppard He decided not to go to university. Instead, he went straight to work as a reporter at a local newspaper in Bristol, west of England.
“I wanted to be a great journalist,” he said. Stoppard. “My first ambition was to lie on the floor of an African airport while machine gun bullets whizzed over my typewriter. But I was of little use as a reporter. I felt I had no right to ask questions. “I always thought they would throw the kettle at me or call the police.”
Although he found journalism daunting, he dedicated himself to working as a theater and film critic, and his love for drama grew. He began to forge influential friendships with actors and other writers who would shape his career. He decided to move to London and start writing plays.
Success only came after dogged persistence and sleepless nights spent smoking cigarette after cigarette and fighting writer’s block.
One of Britain’s most accomplished critics, Michael Billington, who reported on every premiere by Stoppard for half a century, tried to specify the playwright’s status in an article in the British newspaper Guardian in 2015.
Billington discovered that Stoppard he was “a writer capable of provoking admiration, awe and wonder, as well as perplexity and bewilderment, sometimes all in the same night.”
In response to frequent criticism that Stoppard could be excessively cerebral, Billington wrote that, at his best, he demonstrated that “intellect and emotion are bedfellows, not opposites.” He showed the world that a scientific or philosophical concept could be a dramatic theme.
Hopes for posterity
The self-deprecating playwright rejected the classification and resisted requests for explanations.
“Whenever I talk to intelligent students about my work, I feel nervous, like I’m going through a custom process”he told the magazine New Yorker in 1977.
Despite his rejection of academic interpretation, Stoppard He hoped his name would live on.
“Frankly, the idea of writing for the future has always meant a lot to me as well,” he said upon receiving a lifetime achievement award in 2017. “I’m never convinced it works like that.”
To Stoppard theater was, above all, entertainment.
“Theater is recreation, it should entertain. But does the audience have to understand everything they see? If you or I go to an art gallery, we don’t understand what the artist is trying to tell us, even if we enjoy the painting,” he said in a 1995 interview.
Stoppard’s Raids in cinema led him to win the top award at the Venice Film Festival in 1990 for his film adaptation of Rosencratz and Guildenstern are dead.
He wrote the script for the empire of the sun by Steven Spielberg and earned an Oscar nomination for his work on Terry Gilliam’s 1985 cult hit, Brazil, before winning with Shakespeare in love.
Stoppard He had four children, two from each of his first two marriages. He married his third wife, television producer Sabrina Guinness, in 2014.
His son Ed Stoppard He is an actor and acted in Leopoldstadt.
Critics praised a Stoppard for confronting his own family history in the work. This marked the end of a theatrical career willing to address almost any topic.
At thirty years old, he said: “I would like, ultimately, before I am taken from head to toe, to have done a little bit of absolutely everything.”