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He has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a nurse, and to [[Miriam Stoppard]] (''née'' Stern and subsequently Miriam Moore-Robinson), (1972–1992), whom he left to begin a relationship with actress [[Felicity Kendal]]. He has two sons from each marriage, including the actor [[Ed Stoppard]] and Will Stoppard, married to violinist, [[Linzi Stoppard]].
He has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a nurse, and to [[Miriam Stoppard]] (''née'' Stern and subsequently Miriam Moore-Robinson), (1972–1992), whom he left to begin a relationship with actress [[Felicity Kendal]]. He has two sons from each marriage, including the actor [[Ed Stoppard]] and Will Stoppard, married to violinist, [[Linzi Stoppard]].


==Political views==

He calls himself a "tame [[libertarian]]".<ref>[http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20071123/ENTERTAINMENT/111230032/1007 Libertarians: the new 'It' faction]</ref>


== Notes ==
== Notes ==

Revision as of 17:09, 4 December 2007

Tom Stoppard
Born (1937-07-03) July 3, 1937 (age 87)
Zlín, Czechoslovakia
Pen nameWilliam Boot (as a theatre critic)
OccupationPlaywright and screenwriter
NationalityBritish
Genredramatic comedy
Subjectvarious, clever wordplay, quick-cut banter[1]

Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, CBE (born as Tomáš Straussler on July 3, 1937)[1] is an Academy Award winning British playwright of more than 24 plays.[1] Born in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, he is famous for plays such as The Coast of Utopia,[2] Arcadia,  and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and also for co-writing screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love.[1]

Biography

Stoppard was born on July 3, 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia[1] and moved to Singapore[1] with other Jews on March 15, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded. However, in 1941 the family had to be evacuated to Darjeeling, India, escaping the Japanese invasion of Singapore.[1] His father, Eugene Straussler, remained behind, as a British army volunteer and died in a Japanese prison camp after capture.[1]

In India, Stoppard received an English education. In late 1945, his mother Martha married a British army major named Kenneth Stoppard,[1] who gave the boys his English surname and moved the family with him to England after the war, in 1946.[1] Stoppard attended the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire, and later completed his education at Pocklington School in Yorkshire.

Stoppard left school at seventeen and began work as a journalist for Western Daily Press in Bristol.[1] Thus, notably, he never received a university education. [3] He remained there from 1954 through 1958. In 1958, the Bristol Evening World offered Stoppard his position as a feature writer, humor columnist and secondary drama critic, which took Stoppard into the world of theater.[1] At the Bristol Old Vic (at the time a well-regarded regional repertory company),[1] Stoppard formed friendships with director John Boorman and actor Peter O'Toole, early in their careers.[1] Stoppard became a somewhat notorious figure in Bristol, being known more for his strained attempts at humor[1] and unstylish clothes than for his writing.[1]

By 1960, he had completed his first play A Walk on the Water,[1] (which was later re-packaged as 1968's Enter a Free Man). Stoppard noted that this first play owed much to Robert Bolt's "Flowering Cherry" (and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman").[1] Within a week after sending A Walk on the Water to an agent, Stoppard received his version of the "Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists' lives."[1] His first play was optioned, later staged in Hamburg, and then broadcast on British Independent Television in 1963.[1]

From September 1962 until April 1963, Stoppard worked in London as a drama critic for Scene magazine,[1] writing reviews and interviews both under his name and under the pseudonym William Boot (taken from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop). In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend 5 months writing in a Berlin mansion, emerging with a one-act play titled "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear"[1] (which later evolved into his Tony-winning play re-titled Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead).[1] In the next few years, Stoppard produced several works for the radio, the television and the theater including "M" is for Moon Among Other Things (1964), A Separate Peace (1966) and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (1966). The 1967 London opening of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at the Vic Theatre made Stoppard an overnight success. Critics immediately greeted it with praise.

Over the next ten years, in addition to writing some of his own works, Stoppard translated into English various plays including some of those by Slawomir Mrozek, Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler and Vaclav Havel. It was at this time that he became influenced by the works of Polish and Czech absurdists.

"Stoppardian" has become a term used to refer to works in which an author makes use of witty statements to create comedy while addressing philosophical concepts.[4]

Human rights activity

By 1977, Stoppard had become concerned with human rights issues, in particular with the situation of political dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe. In February 1977, he visited the Soviet Union (and several Eastern European countries) with a member of Amnesty International.[1] In June, Stoppard met Vladimir Bukovsky in London and travelled to Czechoslovakia (then under communist control), where he met dissident playwright and future president Václav Havel.[1] Stoppard became involved with Index on Censorship, Amnesty International, and the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse[1] and wrote various newspaper articles and letters about human rights.[1] Stoppard was also instrumental in translating Havel's works into English.

The Tom Stoppard Prize was created in 1983 (in Stockholm, under the Charter 77 Foundation) and is awarded to authors of Czech origin. In August 2005 Stoppard visited Minsk to give a seminar on playwriting, and to learn first-hand about various human rights and political problems in Belarus.

Stoppard's passion for human rights influenced several of his works. He wrote Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) based on a request by Andre Previn; it was inspired by a meeting with a Russian exile. In Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979) and Squaring the Circle (1984), he attacks the oppressive old regimes of Eastern Europe [1].

Work for the theatre

Stoppard's plays are plays of ideas that deal with philosophical issues, yet he combines the philosophical ideas he presents with verbal wit[1] and visual humour. His linguistic complexity, with its puns, jokes, innuendo, and other wordplay,[1] is a chief characteristic of his work. Many also feature multiple timelines.

  • (1966) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead[1] is one of Stoppard's most famous works — a comedic play which casts two minor characters from Hamlet as its leads, but with the same lack of power to affect their world or exterior circumstances as they have in Shakespeare's original. Hamlet's role is similarly reversed in terms of his stage time and lines, but it is in his wake that the heroes drift helplessly toward their inevitable demise. Rather than shaping events, they pass the time playing witty word games and pondering their predicament. It is similar in many ways to Samuel Beckett's absurdist Waiting for Godot, particularly in the main characters' lack of purpose and (in)comprehension of their situation.
  • (1968) Enter a Free Man examines a fabulist's world, which, at the end, sadly collapses into the reality of a mundane and unfulfilled life. It was developed from a 1963 television play A Walk on the Water and first performed on the stage on 28 March 1968 with Michael Hordern in the leading role.
  • (1968) The Real Inspector Hound is one of his best-known short plays. In it two theatre critics are watching a Country House Murder Mystery, and become involved in the action by accident. The viewer is watching a play within a play. In a particularly Stoppardian touch, he based the whodunnit the critics are watching very closely on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, knowing full well that the producers of that play (still running in London's West End) could not complain without drawing attention to the very thing they want to conceal, that Stoppard's play (even its title alone) gives away their "surprise" ending.
  • (1970) After Magritte is a surreal piece which manages to place the characters, through perfectly rational means, into situations worthy of a Magritte painting. It features a husband-and-wife dance team, the rather confused mother of one of them, a detective named Foot and a constable named Holmes; Stoppard notes that it is frequently performed as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound.
  • (1972) Jumpers explores the field of academic philosophy, likening it to a highly skilful competitive gymnastics display. Jumpers raises questions such as what do we know? Where do values come from? It is set in an alternate reality where some British astronauts have landed on the moon and "Radical Liberals" (read Communists) have taken over the British government.
  • (1972) Artist Descending a Staircase imitates the disjointed style of the Marcel Duchamp painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, after which it is named. The scenes switch between 1972, 1914 and several other years and focus on a group of three artists who were members of the avant-garde movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Now old, the artists are still experimenting with their styles, but conflict ensues when one of them falls or is pushed down the stairs. The play, meant for radio, turns into something of a murder mystery [2].
  • (1974) Travesties is a parody of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The play starts from the fact that Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin, and James Joyce were all in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1917 (in fact they were there at slightly different times, but Stoppard gets round this by telling the story through the memory of a confused old man, Henry Carr - hence also the facts getting mixed up with the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest, which Carr performed in at the time). There are clear relationships between Joyce's literary work and Tzara's dada art. The relation to Lenin's ideas is less well explained.
  • (1976) Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land combines two one act plays, written to celebrate the British naturalisation of Ed Berman, founder of London’s Almost Free Theatre, where the work was first performed on 6 April 1976 as part of the theatre’s season to celebrate the American bicentennial. Dirty Linen is a farce that portrays a special committee of the House of Commons, appointed to investigate reports that a large number of MPs have been having sex with the same woman. Naturally it contains implied commentary on the government, its workings, its members, and its relationship to the press and to the public. New-Found-Land is a brief interlude in which two government officials try to decide whether to give British citizenship to an eccentric American (based on Berman) and contains an imaginative rhapsody about America.
  • (1977) Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is one of Stoppard's most unusual works. It was written at the request of André Previn and was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg. The play calls for a small cast, but also a full orchestra, which not only provides music throughout the play but also forms an essential part of the action. The play concerns a dissident under an oppressive regime (obviously meant to be taken for a Soviet-controlled state) who is imprisoned in a mental hospital, from which he will not be released until he admits that his statements against the government were caused by a (non-existent) mental disorder.
  • (1978) Night and Day is about journalism. Set in a fictional African country governed by the tyrant Mageeba, the plot involves the interactions of two British reporters and a British photographer and the family of a British mine owner during a period of unrest in the country. The playbill for a Chicago theater company's 1996 performance of this play stated that it was based on Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop.
  • (1979) Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth are two works. In Dogg's Hamlet we find the actors speaking a language called Dogg, which consists of ordinary English words but with meanings completely different from the ones we assign them. Three schoolchildren are rehearsing a performance of Hamlet in English, which is to them a foreign language. Cahoot's Macbeth is usually performed with Dogg's Hamlet, and shows a shortened performance of Macbeth carried out under the eyes of a secret policeman who suspects the actors of subversion against the state.
  • (1979) 15-Minute Hamlet The entire play of Hamlet, only in fifteen minutes. An excerpt from Dogg's Hamlet, it is often performed and published on its own.
  • (1979) Undiscovered Country is an adaptation of Das Weite Land by the esteemed Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler.
  • (1981) On the Razzle is a comedic farce based on a play by 19th century Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Einen Jux will er sich machen (which is the source for Thornton Wilder's plays "The Merchant of Yonkers" and The Matchmaker and the musical Hello, Dolly! as well).
  • (1982) The Real Thing examines love and fidelity, and makes extensive use of play within a play.
  • (1984) Rough Crossing is based on a classic farce by Molnar and takes place on shipboard as two playwrights struggle to finish a musical comedy and rehearse it before docking in New York. Contains numerous references to famous musical comedies such as produced by Gilbert and Sullivan.
  • (1986) Dalliance An adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's "Liebelei," set in 1890s Vienna, the play depicts the main character Fritz, who learns that the life of simple mutual love is better than that of a bon vivant. Ironically, Fritz learns this only in the last days before he dies in a duel.
  • (1988) Hapgood mixes the themes of espionage and quantum mechanics, especially exploring the idea that in both fields, observing an event changes the nature of the event. He also compares the dual nature of light (is it a wave that sometimes seems like particles, or vice versa) with a double agent who is not sure which side he is really working for.
  • (1993) Arcadia alternates between a pair of present day researchers investigating an early 19th century literary mystery and the real incident they are investigating. It touches on mathematics, thermodynamics, literature, and landscape gardening as it examines the quest for knowledge.
  • (1995) Indian Ink is based on his radio play In The Native State, and examines British rule in India from both sides.
  • (1997) The Invention of Love investigates the life and death of Oxford poet and classicist A. E. Housman, especially his repressed homosexual love for his friend Moses Jackson, contrasting Housman with Oscar Wilde's public fall from grace.
  • (2002) The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy about the origins of modern political radicalism in 19th century Russia. The central figures in the action are Michael Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, and Alexander Herzen. The work consists of three plays: "Voyage", "Shipwreck", and "Salvage".
  • (2006) Rock 'n' Roll spans the years from 1968 to 1990 from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime, and of Cambridge where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher. Stoppard gives the character Max Morrow a surprising number of lines relating to fish pie, thought to be a way of teasing Brian Cox (who played Morrow in the first performances) about an embarrassing TV ad for Young's Fish Pie he had done many years before. Its first public performance (a preview) was 3 June, 2006 at the Royal Court Theatre. It was a controversial addition to the Royal Court's 50th anniversary season, due to the left-leaning nature of much of the Royal Court's work and the anti-communist nature of much of Stoppard's work (including "Rock 'n' Roll" itself).
  • Henry IV is a play written by Luigi Pirandello in Italian. Tom Stoppard's translation of the work is noted for its colloquial dialog.

Work for radio, film, and TV

File:Tom Stoppard from What Is Brazil.jpg
Tom Stoppard, a screenshot taken from the 1985 documentary "What is Brazil?"

In his early years Stoppard wrote extensively for BBC radio, in many cases introducing a touch of surrealism. His original works for radio are:

Stoppard has also adapted many of his stage works for radio.

In his television play Professional Foul (1977), an English philosophy professor visits Prague, officially to speak at a colloquium, unofficially to watch a football international between England and Czechoslovakia. He meets one of his former students and is persuaded to smuggle the student's dissident thesis out of the country.

He has also adapted many of his own plays for film and TV, notably the 1990 production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Tom Stoppard has written extensively for film and television. Some of his better-known scripts and adaptations include:

It is rumoured that Stoppard assisted George Lucas in polishing up some of the dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, though Stoppard received no official or formal credit in this role. He worked in a similar capacity with Tim Burton on his film Sleepy Hollow.

Awards

He was appointed CBE in 1978 and knighted in 1997. He has been co-opted into the Outrapo group.

Novel

Stoppard has written one novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966). It is set in contemporary London and its cast includes not only the eighteenth century figure of the dandified Malquist and his ineffectual Boswell, Moon, but also a couple of cowboys with live bullets in their six-shooters, a lion (banned from the Ritz) and a donkey-borne Irishman claiming to be the Risen Christ.

Personal life

He has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a nurse, and to Miriam Stoppard (née Stern and subsequently Miriam Moore-Robinson), (1972–1992), whom he left to begin a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He has two sons from each marriage, including the actor Ed Stoppard and Will Stoppard, married to violinist, Linzi Stoppard.

Political views

He calls himself a "tame libertarian".[5]

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad "Salon.com People | Tom Stoppard" (biography), Amy Reiter, November 2001, webpage: Salon-TStoppard.
  2. ^ "BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Stoppard play sweeps Tony awards" BBC News Online, June 2007, webpage: BBC739885.
  3. ^ http://www.complete-review.com/authors/stoppard.htm
  4. ^ http://www.enotes.com/rosencrantz-guildenstern/
  5. ^ Libertarians: the new 'It' faction
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