British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, author of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” and “Seriously Now”, died at the age of 88 in the county of Dorset, United Kingdom, the company that managed him announced this Saturday. The author “died peacefully at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family”, said United Agents in a statement.
Tom Stoppard wrote for theater, film and radio; He transferred his texts from one stage to another and also signed literary adaptations, moving between classics and pop culture. He was one of the few authors to give rise to an adjective, “Stoppardian”, in the Oxford dictionary, due to the identity mark printed in the texts he signed, The Guardian newspaper wrote today.
“After Magritte”, “Rock n’Roll”, “Now Seriously” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” are some of Tom Stoppard’s dramaturgical texts that were performed in Portugal.
In 1990, he made a film adaptation of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”, a tragicomedy inspired by Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet”, with which he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
From his long and award-winning career – five of his plays were awarded Tony theater awards -, highlights include co-writing the screenplay for the film “The Passion of Shakespeare” (1998), with Marc Norman, or the film adaptation of “The Russian House” (1990), by John le Carré, and “The Empire of the Sun” (1987), by JG Ballard. He was also one of the co-writers of the dystopian film “Brazil” (1985), directed by Terry Gilliam.
“Leopoldstadt”, from 2020, is one of his most recent texts for theater and which he considered one of the most personal, after discovering the true story of his Jewish family, and that many of his Czech relatives died in concentration camps during the Second World War.
Tom Stoppard was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1937, but, because of the Nazi invasion, the family managed to flee in 1939 to Singapore and then to India. After her father’s death, her mother remarried a British officer, adopting Stoppard as her surname and the United Kingdom as her home.