British playwright Tom Stoppard, who won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1998 film Shakespeare In Love, has died at the age of 88, United Agents said 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 talent agency said.
“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 said. “It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him.”
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Five of his works won Tony Awards for best play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968; Travesties in 1976; The Real Thing in 1984; The Coast of Utopia in 2007; and Leopoldstadt in 2023.
But to non-theatregoers, Stoppard is best remembered for his work in cinema, which included the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises and an Oscar in 1999 for his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, which scooped a total of seven Academy Awards that year.
The writer was born Tomas Straussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlin in what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. His father was a doctor for the Bata shoe company, and when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939, the family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory.
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