Tom Stoppard, the legendary playwright and screenwriter, has died at 88.
United Agents, the talent agency that represented the writer, confirmed Stoppard’s death in a statement to Entertainment Weekly on Saturday.
“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 agency wrote. “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 honor to work with Tom and to know him.”
A cause of death was not provided.
“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else” is a famous line from Stoppard’s acclaimed fantasia Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but after the news of the famed writer’s death, the significance of those words has amplified.
The Czech-born British playwright, who left his birth country as a refugee when Nazi rule loomed, began his career as a journalist and radio play author before translating his wordsmith intellectualism into heady, often comical plays about loquacious romantics. His 1966 work Rosencrantz, which chronicled the plight of two minor players in Hamlet and their building confusion over the progression of events in the Bard’s tragedy, kicked his decades-long theater career into high gear and won him the Tony for Best Play.
Stoppard would become well acquainted with that award, scoring five Tonys over the years, including for his WWI drama Travesties; the oft-revived couples inquiry The Real Thing; his lush historical epic The Coast of Utopia, which coursed the trajectory of pre-revolution Russia across three-plus decades over three separate plays with 44 actors; and his final play, Leopoldstadt, which charted the history of a Jewish family in Vienna across the first half of the 20th century.
Stoppard’s plays were so labyrinthine in thought and density that many people attended them despite not fully comprehending them or developing a downright disdain for them — Christopher Durang’s Tony-winning comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike even had one character lamenting having to sit through one of his play series.
Still, his writing stimulated adventurous, open-minded theatergoers (even when they couldn’t always wrap their heads around the content), and actors such as Glenn Close, Ethan Hawke, Stockard Channing, and Billy Crudup jumped at the opportunity to star in his works, with many of them snatching their own Tony Awards for the privilege.
Stoppard was also a favorite of major filmmakers in addition to being a decorated playwright, with a hand in writing films for Steven Spielberg (Empire of the Sun), Terry Gilliam (Brazil), Joe Wright (Anna Karenina), and John Madden (as a co-winner of the best original screenplay Oscar for 1998 Best Picture-winner Shakespeare in Love). Spielberg later employed Stoppard’s wit for an uncredited polish on the screenplay to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
He even tried his hand at film directing, helming his own adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 1990, starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.
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Stoppard, a three-time married man and father of four sons (including Ed Stoppard, a well-known U.K. actor), was oft-compared to a rock star — notably Mick Jagger — in his youth due to his pouty stare (and was a rock enthusiast himself, having written the classics-scored counterculture drama Rock N Roll). Although he didn’t end grabbing a mic and strutting across Madison Square Garden, in the eyes of many artists and audiences, he ended up becoming one anyway.