Author Tom Stoppard “passed away peacefully at home in Dorset, surrounded by family,” as stated by United Agents in a communiqué.
Stoppard wrote for theatre, cinema, and radio; he adapted his texts across different platforms and also authored literary adaptations, navigating between the classics and pop culture.
He was one of the few authors whose name gave rise to an adjective, “Stoppardian,” in the Oxford dictionary, due to the distinctive mark he left on the texts he authored, a fact highlighted by The Guardian.
Some of Tom Stoppard’s dramatic works that have been staged in Portugal include “After Magritte,” “Rock n’ Roll,” “The Real Thing,” and “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.”
In 1990, he created a film adaptation of “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” a tragicomedy inspired by Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” with which he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Among his long and acclaimed career—five of his plays were awarded Tony Awards—Stoppard co-wrote the screenplay for the film “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) with Marc Norman, and adapted “The Russia House” (1990) by John le Carré and “Empire of the Sun” (1987) by J.G. Ballard for cinema.
He was also one of the co-writers of the dystopian film “Brazil” (1985), directed by Terry Gilliam.
“Leopoldstadt,” from 2020, is one of his most recent theatrical texts and one he considered one of his most personal, after discovering his Jewish family’s true history and that many of his Czech relatives died in concentration camps during World War II.
Born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1937, Stoppard’s family fled Nazi invasion to Singapore in 1939, and subsequently to India. Following his father’s death, his mother remarried a British officer, adopting Stoppard as a surname and making the United Kingdom their home.
