British playwright and Oscar winner Tom Stoppard dies at 88

British playwright Tom Stoppard, a playful dramatist who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998's Shakespeare In Love, has died aged 88.

In a statement Saturday, United Agents said Stoppard died "peacefully" at his home in Dorset in southern England, surrounded by his family.

"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," they said. 

"It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him."

The Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was garlanded with honours, including a shelf full of theatre awards.

Tributes flowed in after news of his death, including from Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, who described Stoppard as his favourite playwright.

"He leaves us with a majestic body of intellectual and amusing work," he said on X alongside three photos.

Over a career that spanned six decades, Stoppard's brain-teasing plays for theatre, radio and screen ranged from Shakespeare and science to philosophy and the historic tragedies of the 20th century.

Five of them 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.

Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was their "mixture of language, knowledge and feeling".

"It's those three things in gear together which make him so remarkable," Lee said.

Stoppard 'put on Englishness like a coat'

The writer was born Tomás Sträussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlín 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.

In late 1941, as Japanese forces closed in on the city-state, Tomas, his brother and their mother fled again, this time to India. His father stayed behind and later died when his ship was attacked as he tried to leave Singapore.

In 1946, his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to threadbare postwar Britain.

The eight-year-old Tom "put on Englishness like a coat," he later said, growing up to be a quintessential Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare.

He did not go to university but began his career at 17 as a journalist on newspapers in Bristol and then as a theatre critic for Scene magazine in London.

A prolific writer with shelf full of awards

He wrote plays for radio and television including A Walk on the Water, televised in 1963, and made his stage breakthrough with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which re-imagined Shakespeare's Hamlet from the viewpoint of two hapless minor characters. 

A mix of tragedy and absurdist humour, it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was staged at Britain's National Theatre, then run by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.

A stream of exuberant, innovative plays followed, including meta-whodunnit The Real Inspector Hound and Jumpers, a blend of physical and philosophical gymnastics, and Travesties, which set intellectuals including James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin colliding in Zurich during World War I.

His late play Leopoldstadt drew on his own family's story for the tale of a Jewish Viennese family over the first half of the 20th century. 

Stoppard said he began thinking of his personal link to the Holocaust quite late in life, only discovering after his mother's death in 1996 that many members of his family, including all four grandparents, had died in concentration camps.

"I wouldn't have written about my heritage, that's the word for it nowadays, while my mother was alive, because she'd always avoided getting into it herself," Stoppard told The New Yorker in 2022.

Leopoldstadt premiered in London at the start of 2020 to rave reviews; weeks later all theatres were shut by the COVID-19 pandemic. It eventually opened on Broadway in late 2022, going on to win four Tony Awards.

Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard also wrote many radio plays, a novel, television series including Parade's End and many film screenplays. 

These included dystopian Terry Gilliam comedy Brazil, Steven Spielberg-directed war drama Empire of the Sun, Elizabethan romcom Shakespeare in Love — for which he and Marc Norman shared a best adapted screenplay Oscar — code-breaking thriller Enigma and Russian epic Anna Karenina.

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his services to literature.

He was married three times: to Jose Ingle, Miriam Stern — better known as the health journalist Dr Miriam Stoppard — and TV producer Sabrina Guinness. The first two marriages ended in divorce. 

He is survived by four children, including the actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.

AP