"Shakespeare In Love" Oscar-winner Tom Stoppard dead at the age of 88
The British playwright Tom Stoppard has died.
Image: Evan Agostini/Invision via AP/dpa
Stoppard received an Oscar in 1999.
Image: Fernando Alvarado/EFE/dpa
Stoppard wrote numerous plays.
Image: dpa (Archivbild)
The British playwright Tom Stoppard has died.
Image: Evan Agostini/Invision via AP/dpa
Stoppard received an Oscar in 1999.
Image: Fernando Alvarado/EFE/dpa
Stoppard wrote numerous plays.
Image: dpa (Archivbild)
The Oscar winner ("Shakespeare in Love") was a master of intellectual comedy and loved sophisticated wordplay. Now Tom Stoppard has died at the age of 88.
29.11.2025, 21:02
29.11.2025, 21:12
dpa
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- British playwright Tom Stoppard has died at the age of 88.
- Stoppard expressed his love of the theater with dozens of plays, and he also created radio plays.
- In 1999, he and Marc Norman won the Oscar for the screenplay of "Shakespeare In Love".
As a young man, he looked like Mick Jagger: the untamed mop of hair, the full lips, the preference for flowing coats. Now, many years later, the rock musician himself mourns the loss of Tom Stoppard - the British playwright who once looked so much like him. "He was entertaining and sarcastic in a quiet way. A friend and companion I will always miss," Mick Jagger told the PA news agency.
At the age of 88, the playwright and Oscar winner died at his home in the English county of Dorset surrounded by his family, as the PA news agency reported, citing his agency United Agents, which published a statement on its website.
Stoppard will be remembered for "his works, for their brilliance and humanity", but also for "his generosity and his deep love of the English language", the statement said. Jagger said in an X post that he leaves behind "an impressive body of work full of intellect and humor."
From refugee child to Oscar winner
Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler in what is now Zlín in the Czech Republic. His Jewish father worked as a doctor in the company hospital of the Bata shoe company. The owner saved his Jewish employees by transferring them to branches all over the world shortly before the German occupation in 1939. Stoppard's family ended up in Singapore and later in India. Many of his relatives - he only found out decades later - were killed in concentration camps.
Stoppard finally left school at 17 and initially worked as a local journalist in Bristol. His first stage play, "The Spleen of George Riley", premiered in Hamburg in 1964. In 1967, he finally presented his best-known stage work "Rosenkranz und Güldenstern sind tot". The drama about Hamlet's two friends from William Shakespeare's famous tragedy won the Tony Award for Best Play the following year.
Stoppard expressed his love of the theater in dozens of plays, including radio plays. He translated Arthur Schnitzler and Vaclav Havel into English and was repeatedly hired by Hollywood to put the finishing touches to screenplays - including Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade".
In 1999, he finally won an Oscar together with Marc Norman for the screenplay "Shakespeare In Love" with Gwyneth Paltrow - a highlight of his long career. Two years earlier, he was even knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature, according to the PA news agency.
Still in the theater in old age
The famous playwright is survived by four sons, including the actor Ed Stoppard, and his third wife Sabrina Guinness, whom he married in 2014.
Writing was often not so easy for him in old age, as he once said. "When I was younger, I could do something worthwhile if I only had half a day," he told The Times a few years ago. "Now I need five days to leave the world behind me and two weeks during which I don't talk to anyone to keep everything in my head."
The fact that Stoppard's works will continue to be an integral part of the world of theater in the future seems unsurprising given his vita: from January 2026, for example, a production of his play "Arcadia" can be seen at London's Old Vic Theater.
