Tom Stoppard fled the Nazis as a toddler and became Britain's wittiest playwright
Tomáš Sträussler left Czechoslovakia on the very day the Nazis invaded in 1939, spent his boyhood in Singapore and the Himalayas, and arrived in England at eight speaking only English. As Tom Stoppard he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Arcadia, won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, and ended with Leopoldstadt, about Vienna's Jews.
He was born on 3 July 1937 in Zlín, the younger son of Eugen Sträussler, a doctor for the Bata shoe company, and Martha Becková; the family were non-observant Jews. Just before the German occupation, the firm's owner, Jan Antonín Baťa, moved Jewish employees to branches abroad, and on 15 March 1939 the family escaped to Singapore. Ahead of the Japanese occupation, the boys and their mother fled to India, while the father stayed to help defend the colony. Tom long believed his father had died a prisoner of war, but later learned he drowned in 1942 when his ship was bombed.
In Darjeeling the brothers attended Mount Hermon, an American multiracial school, and became Tom and Peter. In 1945 their mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British Army major, who adopted the boys and brought the family to Nottingham in 1946. Suddenly an English schoolboy, Stoppard later called himself an honorary Englishman, still wary of a mispronounced word giving him away. After school in Nottingham and Yorkshire he worked as a journalist and drama critic, then turned playwright in 1960.
His breakthrough, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966, retold Hamlet from the viewpoint of two minor courtiers, and he later directed a 1990 film version starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom run through his work, often wrapped in philosophy and dazzling wordplay; Arcadia in 1993 is a favourite example. He also wrote screenplays, including Brazil and Empire of the Sun, and Shakespeare in Love earned him the Academy Award.
Critics set him beside Shakespeare and Shaw, and he became one of the most performed dramatists of his generation. He won three Olivier Awards and five Tonys, was knighted in 1997 and received the Order of Merit in 2000. His last play, Leopoldstadt, which follows a Jewish family in early twentieth-century Vienna, opened at Wyndham's Theatre in 2020, winning the Olivier for best new play and the 2023 Tony for best play. Stoppard died on 29 November 2025.
Source: Tom Stoppard
