Sir Tom Stoppard dies at 88

Sir Tom Stoppard’s life always read like something he might have invented himself: clever, full of twists, and shaped by his ability to be both dauntingly intellectual and entertaining. 

Passing yesterday at the age of 88, he leaves behind a body of work that reshaped modern theatre. Obituaries will rightly credit his plays such as The Real Thing, Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia for making him famous, but unbeknown to many he was just as valuable in film.

Hollywood relied on him constantly and usually without credit to strengthen scripts and characters. He reworked scenes in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Hook, Schindler’s List and George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode III, but only the  directors and producers knew it. His Oscar for Shakespeare in Love was in fact the rare moment his name appeared on screen.

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But what Stoppard didn’t know for most of his life was his own story. Born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 to a Jewish family, he was taken out of Europe at the start of the rise of Nazism.

His father was killed fleeing Singapore and his mother remarried in India, which saw Stoppard – as he became – arriving in England as a schoolboy with a new name. His mother never spoke about their Jewishness or the relatives left behind, and he grew up fully English, knowing nothing about his family.

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That changed in the early 1990s when a Czech cousin contacted him and revealed that  his grandparents and most of his extended family had been murdered in the Holocaust. Stoppard later admitted he felt guilty for never asking questions and said the revelation “shook something loose” that had been buried since childhood.

Choosing to explore that history resulted in him eventually writing Leopoldstadt. Premiering in 2020, it followed the life of a Viennese Jewish family from security to devastation. Stoppard insisted the play was not autobiographical, but invited  Jewish cast members to share their own family stories with him during rehearsals, and he absorbed them as he  stitched together a past he had been denied.

The response to Leopoldstadt was intense. Simon Sebag Montefiore called the play “a memorial in drama” and David Hare said Stoppard had written “with the honesty of someone finally able to face his own history. ”

Stoppard married three times: first to nurse Josie Ingle, with whom he had sons Oliver and Barnaby; then to journalist and author Miriam Stoppard, with whom he had two more sons, Ed (the actor) and Will. He met and later married Sabrina Guinness in 2014.

That the playwright never reinvented himself as a public Jewish figure after discovering his roots was what the community desired, but Leopoldstadt became his act of remembrance and prophetically very late in his life .

• Brigit Grant, Life magazine editor