Sir Tom Stoppard, often thought of as the quintessential contemporary English playwright and gentleman, was actually born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, on July 3, 1937. Stoppard took the name of his stepfather, Kenneth Stoppard, a British officer who married his mother after his natural father was killed during the Second World War. In the 1960s Stoppard began to write plays that treat a breathtaking variety of topics, from nuclear physics to metaphysics. Stoppard’s early play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which retells the story of Hamlet from the point of view of its most minor characters, was a huge success when it premiered in 1966. Stoppard’s subsequent plays include The Real Inspector Hound (1968), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1982), Hapgood (1988), and The Invention of Love (1997). While known primarily as a playwright, Stoppard has also written both fiction (Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, 1966) and screenplays, including those for Brazil (1986), Empire of the Sun (1987), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1991). Most recently, Stoppard won the Best Screenplay Oscar for the 1998 film Shakespeare In Love. Like this film, Stoppard’s Arcadia moves back in time, exploring history to tell us more about our own era.
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