Key Highlights
- “It was an honor to work with Tom and to know him.”Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger was among those paying tribute, calling Stoppard “a giant of the English theater, both highly intellectual and very funny in all his plays and scripts.“He had a dazzling wit and loved classical and popular music alike which often featured in his huge body of work,” said Jagger, who produced the 2001 film “Enigma,” with a screenplay by Stoppard.
- “He was amusing and quietly sardonic.
- A friend and companion and I will always miss him.”Advertisement King Charles III said Stoppard was “a dear friend who wore his genius lightly.”Theaters in London’s West End will dim their lights for two minutes on Tuesday in tribute. Portrait of playwright Tom Stoppard, July 1974.
- (Photo by Chris Ridley/Radio Times/)Radio Times via Getty ImagesBrain-teasing playsOver a six-decade career, Stoppard’s brain-teasing plays for theater, 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. Advertisement 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.”The writer was born Tomás Sträussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic.
