Sir Tom Stoppard dies aged 88

He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1978 and a Knight Bachelor in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth II. He even endowed an award of his own, The Tom Stoppard Prize in 1983, given annually for an outstanding non-fiction work by a writer, like himself, of Czech origin. It was first awarded to Eva Kantůrková for My Companions in the Bleak House in 1984.

But as for emotion – that usually came as something to be analysed, not actually felt. People watching his plays laughed but only rarely cried.

Until, perhaps, his final, multiple award-winning play, Leopoldstadt, which opened at Wyndham’s in 2020 and transferred to Broadway in 2022. It is Stoppard’s most haunting and heartfelt play, rendering all the others, brilliant as they are, as mere rehearsals for this final pinnacle of human expression.

Here, for the first time he offered a meditation of his own roots. The play features Jewish life in Vienna, in which multigenerational characters roam. He takes a step back; they are Viennese while he, himself, was Czech.

The play opens in 1899 and ends in 1995, with a roll call of the dead. Stoppard describes an intellectual, assimilated Jewish family accustomed to discussing Freud, Mahler and Herzl, suddenly faced with Nazism. It is a portrayal in which Stoppard is virtually present in the shape of the character Leo, but he denied it’s autobiographical.

At the age of 82, the playwright told Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times, that he did not realise the topicality of Leopoldstadt, or that antisemitism caused the downfall of Corbynism. He was embarrassed by his lack of knowledge about antisemitism, particularly in the Labour party, having never experienced it himself.

But Stoppard admitted: “It’s the one thing I feel I’ve learnt over the years, that the story has got to work emotionally, not simply as an exercise in ingenuity.”

He was born Tomas Straussler to a non-observant Jewish family in Zlin, former Czechoslovakia, who fled the German invasion in 1939 when he was a toddler.

The family moved to Singapore, then India. But Stoppard’s father, Eugen was left behind and died when the Japanese bombed a ship he was on. His mother, Martha, then married an English army major, Kenneth Stoppard, and the young Tom lived in the UK from the age of nine, knowing nothing about his past as a refugee. In the early 1990s, a relative he had never met before told him the full story. He did not even know he was Jewish at the time.

“I found myself transformed into a little English schoolboy, and I never looked back. …I began to feel bad about not looking back and the end result was Leopoldstadt.” Rather than write his own story, in true Stoppard style he said he wanted to capture something broader. But he regretted missing the chance to have the conversations with his mother, which he thought would have added some facets to the story he was trying to tell.

Stoppard felt odd at the mention of his Jewishness, which had always eluded him. Yet, although never exposed to religion, he was exercised by the idea of God.

“The idea of the irreducible immaterial attracts me,” he said. “I think about God a lot. Suddenly out of the woodwork, out he pops.” He once watched a wildlife film featuring “completely amazing mammals, and indeed insects. I’ve always thought that is a strange problem for Darwin. Why the variety? And at the same time it isn’t a good fit with the creator, either.”

All four of Stoppard’s grandparents died in Terezin during the Holocaust. When Martha reluctantly divulged these facts, she drew a family tree for him, a scene which appears in Leopoldstadt. He empathised with George Steiner’s question: how there could be poetry after Auschwitz? Yet his tendency was to avoid thinking about the Middle East and being Jewish, generally.

“When I’m asked to go to a meeting or join a committee…..in the role of a Jewish writer, I kind of bridle at that and I think, ‘Wait a minute, I’m an English writer,’” he told Appleyard when Leopoldstadt opened in 2020. “That’s the language I use and I don’t write particularly about Jews or Jewishness, so why would I be a Jewish writer?” Appleyard, “sobbing convulsively at the (play’s) end”, wondered if Leopoldstadt was his greatest play.

Well into old age Stoppard carried himself with the vibrant dignity he was known for; long, flowing hair, ever-vigilant expression, bohemian clothes. In his crisp white shirt and black jacket, with his long, expressive hands, there was a touch of stylish 18th century irony about him.

Stoppard’s plays are the product of long gestation. They would normally take four to five years to dream up, write, rewrite and rehearse. Leopoldstadt took even longer: “It was harder to maintain the energy to write it than even the previous play and the one before that. I was thinking, ‘I can’t go through this again’ – but on the other hand once it’s out of the way, what else will I be doing?”

He carried a lexicon of memorable, witty lines in his head. Typical was Lytton Strachey’s: “What has posterity ever done for me?” But he always felt overestimated.

“Estimation in the art world always goes up and down over the years,” he said, philosophically. “It’s like a photograph of where reputation lies at a given moment. And it doesn’t mean anything more than that.”

Stoppard did not write another play after Leopoldstadt, which now remains his moving swansong. He had toyed with the idea of writing about journalism, with emphasis on Hacked Off, but nothing materialised.

After his first play A Walk on the Water, retitled in its London performance as Enter a Free Man, in 1968, which concerned an unsuccessful inventor, Stoppard shot to fame with the challenging Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which made its Old Vic debut in1967 after an Edinburgh Fringe production the previous year.

Nothing like it had really been seen on the London stage before. It was hailed as an existential tragicomedy for its inventive dialogue and linguistic skills. The play takes the perspective of two minor, confused and fragmented characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who have no agency over their fate. Hamlet appears as a minor character. The play has been compared to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Jumpers, first performed in 1972, links academic philosophy with competitive gymnastics, and asks the questions we have come to expect from Stoppard: "What do we know and where do values come from?”

Travesties in 1974 has a Monty Pythonesque feel, and some regard it as intellectual vaudeville, with singing and dancing blending the comedic with the intense. Three famous revolutionary figures, Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce and the dadaist poet Tristan Tzara meet in the memory of an ageing British consular official, Henry Carr in Zurich in 1917. It blends history and fantasy and explores conflicting ideologies about art, politics, history and the subjective nature of truth. Carr’s misremembering is a moving tragedy of time.

This was followed by The Real Thing in 1982, which questions the nature of love, fidelity and the complexities of human relationships. Then came the dystopian science fiction film, Brazil in 1985,.

Arcadia, first staged in 1993, some consider his masterpiece. Its title suggests harmony with nature, and it has been variously described by some as his richest, most ravishing comedy to date – and by others as too pretentious. It ponders such mathematical puzzles as Fermat’s Last Theorem, while considering how clues from the past are interpreted in modern times. In its final scene Stoppard proved his ability to sustain an emotional impact which drew tears from its audience.

Alexander Larman wrote in The Critic: “The actor Neil Pearson, who played the pompous but charismatic academic, Bernard Nightingale, in a 2008 revival, told me it was a privilege to be able to discuss the play with Stoppard. Dan Stevens, who played Septimus, nudged me in rehearsal and said: ‘This is the closest we will ever get to hearing from Chekhov.’”

For a period in the 70s, Larman wrote: “Stoppard was the quintessential, intellectual playwright. His major plays of the period, including Jumpers, Travesties and Night and Day, ( a news satire based on Stoppard’s experience as a former journalist) were commercially successful on a grand scale, and a large part of the writing’s brilliance lay in convincing theatregoers, for a couple of hours, that they were far cleverer and better-read than they actually were.”

Then came something different: the well-received film, Shakespeare in Love in 1998 starring Joseph Fiennes, Gwynneth Paltrow, Judi Dench, Geoffrey Rush, Ben Affleck and Colin Firth.

As for Stoppard’s personality, in Hermione Lee’s lengthy biography, published in 2020, she observes that he could be “completely, icily alone”, able to remove himself from the mundane cares and woes of everyday existence in favour of “something altogether greater.”

Stoppard once reflected of his own success: “What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.”

He lived in Dorset with Sabrina Guinness, to whom he was married for nearly six years. Before that, he was married to Miriam Stern, Josie Ingle and was involved for a long time with Felicity Kendal. He is survived by Sabrina and his four children, Oliver, Barnaby, Ed and Will and several grandchildren.

Tom Stoppard: born July 3, 1937; died November 29, 2025