Screenwriter won Oscar for ‘Shakespeare in Love’

Tom Stoppard, the Oscar-winning writer behind Shakespeare in Love, has died at age 88. 

His talent agency, United Agents, confirmed the news in a statement shared on Saturday, saying he passed away peacefully at his home in Dorset, England.

“We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved client and friend, Tom Stoppard, has died peacefully at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family,” the agency said. 

The statement remembered him for “his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language.”

Born in 1937 in what is now the Czech Republic, Stoppard survived a childhood shaped by war and loss. His family escaped to Singapore during World War II. 

After eventually moving to England, he left school in his teens and threw himself into writing. He once joked that as a young student, “If I had been run over by a bus then, I would have been one of the most ignorant corpses around.”

Stoppard rose to prominence with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and went on to earn numerous awards for his plays and screenwriting. 

His biggest screen success came with the 1998 romantic drama Shakespeare in Love, which won him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 

Speaking about the film in 1998, he shared that writing about Shakespeare meant using “lots of spaces to invent,” adding that some of the story was “pure mischief.”

Across his career, he worked on film scripts including Brazil, Empire of the Sun and Anna Karenina, while his plays continued to earn critical acclaim well into recent years. 

Stoppard described his writing process as almost instinctive, saying in 2019 that “all the good bits are subconscious.”

He hoped his work would live on for generations. “I aspire to write for posterity,” he once said. “I like the idea of them being part of the furniture.”

Tom Stoppard is survived by his wife and children.