Tom Stoppard (born Tomas Straussler) was born July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czech Republic (Formerly Czechoslovakia). Due to the upcoming Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the shoe company that employed his father transferred the Straussler family to Singapore in 1939. However, upon arrival in Singapore, there was an invasion by the Japanese. Therefore, Stoppard, his mother, and his brother fled to India. Stoppard’s father stayed behind and died. In 1941, Stoppard and his family settled in Darjeeling, where he attended school. In 1946, Stoppard’s mother married a British army major, and they moved to England. Taking his stepfather's last name, he then became Tom Stoppard.
At the age of seventeen, Stoppard began work at the Western Daily Press as a journalist. In 1958, he was offered a position at the Bristol Evening World as a drama critic. Stoppard became acquainted with the director John Boorman at the Bristol Old Vic, a theater company. With an introduction to the world of theater, Stoppard began to write radio plays. His first stage play was written in 1960 as A Walk on the Water and was renamed and republished in 1968 as Enter a Free Man. Between 1962 and 1963, Stoppard began working as a drama critic in London for Scene Magazine. He was given the Ford Foundation grant, which allowed Stoppard to live in Berlin for five months and work on his Tony award-winning play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966).
Stoppard continued to write plenty of plays, including A Separate Peace (1966), Jumpers (1972), and Travesties (1974). Stoppard also wrote a novel at this time called Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (1966). Stoppard also began translating plays into English, particularly plays written by Polish and Czech absurdist playwrights. These plays influenced his work, and in 1982 he premiered The Real Thing. It won a Tony award. Stoppard also worked on co-writing films, including Brazil (1985) and the scripts for Empire of the Sun (1987) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). In 1993, he premiered his next play, Arcadia, which won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and was awarded a Tony Award.
Stoppard also wrote the film Shakespeare in Love (1998), which won seven Academy Awards, a BAFTA award, and a Golden Globe Award. His next play was a trilogy of plays, The Coast of Utopia (2002), and in 2006 he wrote the play Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006). Stoppard continued working on films and television series such as Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (2012) and Parade’s End (2013). In 2019, Stoppard wrote the play Leopoldstat (2020), which won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play.
Tom Stoppard is a prolific playwright who has written many plays. He is most famous for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), and Arcadia (1993).
