‘Shakespeare in Love’ Screenwriter Was 88

Tom Stoppard, an Oscar-winning screenwriter, has died. He was 88.

The celebrated playwright — who won an Academy Award for co-writing 1998’s Shakespeare in Love — died at his home in Dorset, England, according to his talent agency United Agents, which announced his death in a statement on X on Saturday, Nov. 29.

“We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved client and friend, Tom Stoppard, has died peacefully at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family,” the statement said of Stoppard, who was also known for plays such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties and Leopoldstadt.

“He will be remembered for his works, for their brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language. It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him,” the statement concluded.

Stoppard was born Thomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), in 1937. When World War II began, his family fled to Singapore; as an adult, he learned all four of his grandparents and three of his mother’s sisters were killed in the Holocaust. 

When Japan invaded Singapore, Stoppard, his brother and his mother were evacuated to India. His father died in Japanese captivity. His mother married an English army major, who brought his stepsons to England, and Tom adopted his stepfather’s surname, Stoppard.

Stoppard told PEOPLE in 1977 that as a young student in boarding school, he had no literary promise. “I found Shakespeare boring and even [the Charles Dickens novel] David Copperfield was an awful trudge,” he said. “If I had been run over by a bus then, I would have been one of the most ignorant corpses around.”

He quit school at 17 and, he told PEOPLE, decided to become “a great journalist” because he was “always thrilled to meet anybody known for anything at all.” He worked as a reporter, an auto columnist (though he didn’t know how to drive), a critic, a short story writer and a struggling playwright.

His breakout moment came with his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an absurdist comedy that spun off two characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play premiered at Edinburgh Fringe in 1966, and in 1967, it debuted at London’s Old Vic, making him, at the time, the youngest playwright to have their work produced by the National Theatre. When the play came to America, the Broadway production won him his first Tony, for Best Play.

“There was no road to Damascus,” he told PEOPLE of his transformation into a successful playwright. “I just shed one skin and grew another.”

Other plays by Stoppard included Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Arcadia and Leopoldstadt, which reached Broadway in 2022. In all, he was an eight-time Tony nominee with five wins, the most recent in 2023 for Leopoldstadt. 

Stoppard drew inspiration for Leopoldstadt from his family’s experiences during World War II, though the family in the play is Viennese, not Czech. “Because of the age I got to, I was born in 1937, it just felt like time that I dealt with my family’s history,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023.

“But at the same time,” he continued at the time, “I could also say that it arrived in my mind as something I had an instinctive interest in doing. I’d never before thought of my family history, or my own history, as being an inspiration for a play. I’d never remotely come close to writing a play, just by my own personal history, of being connected to, in a negative way, the most important event in European history in the 20th century.”

Stoppard also translated many plays into English, especially works by Polish and Czech authors. 

He began writing for the screen in the ‘60s, working on various shows and TV movies on British television. He co-wrote the 1975 TV movie Three Men in a Boat, and some of his plays were also broadcast.

He co-wrote with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown the 1985 dystopian drama Brazil, widely considered one of Britain’s best films. The trio received an Oscar nomination for their work on the screenplay. 

Stoppard also wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun. He also worked on 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, though he was uncredited. Stoppard told The Guardian in 2010 that he worked as a script doctor on movies about once a year. “The second reason for doing it is that you get to work with people you admire,” he said. “The first reason, of course, is that it’s overpaid.”

The 1998 romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love won Stoppard an Oscar, which he shared with Marc Norman, his cowriter. Norman wrote the original script — which put Shakespeare in his own Romeo and Juliet-like story — and Stoppard worked on the next drafts. 

“The thing that makes life easier for someone writing fiction about Shakespeare is that there are very few signposts, very few agreed upon facts and lots of spaces to invent,” Stoppard told the Los Angeles Times in 1998 about writing a movie about the Bard. “Some of the film is pure mischief. But then again, you’re riding on the back of the most famous love story ever written, so there are lots of strands to work with.”

Stoppard also wrote the screenplay for 2012’s Anna Karenina and received an Emmy nomination for writing the 2012 miniseries Parade’s End. 

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Stoppard was married to Josie Ingle, a nurse, from 1965 to 1972. Together they welcomed sons Oliver and Barnaby. In 1972 he married Miriam Stern, a doctor and author. They welcomed sons Ed and Will. Ed became an actor. Stoppard and Miriam divorced in 1992, amid his relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. In 2014, he married Sabrina Guinness.

For Stoppard, writing was a bit mystical. “All the good bits are subconscious — they truly are,” he told The Spectator in 2019. “It’s one of those things maybe writers like to say of themselves or say of their trade, but it’s very seldom that you sit down knowing pretty much what you have to put on this page of paper. It’s much more the case that it creates itself in the doing, almost as though it creates itself in the physical act of writing.”

He hoped his plays would still be performed after he was gone. “I aspire to write for posterity,” he told the outlet. “I would like my plays to be done occasionally, not just be done when they’re brand new. I like the idea of them being part of the furniture.”

Stoppard is survived by his wife and children.