Tom Stoppard, Oscar- and Tony-winning writer, dead at 88

British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, a playful, probing dramatist who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s Shakespeare In Love, has died. He was 88.

In a statement on Saturday, United Agents said Stoppard died “peacefully” at his home in Dorset in southern England, surrounded by his family.

“He will be remembered for his works, for their brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language,” the talent agency said. “It was an honour to work with Tom and to know him."

The Czech-born Stoppard was often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation and was garlanded with honours, including a shelf full of theatre awards.

Tributes flowed in after news of his death, including from Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, who described Stoppard as his favourite playwright.

"He leaves us with a majestic body of intellectual and amusing work," Jagger wrote on social media platform X alongside three photos.

Theatres in London's West End will dim their lights for two minutes at 7 p.m. local time on Tuesday in recognition of Stoppard.

Over a career that spanned six decades, Stoppard's brain-teasing plays for theatre, radio and screen ranged from Shakespeare and science to philosophy and the historic tragedies of the 20th century.

Five of them won Tony Awards for best play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968; Travesties in 1976; The Real Thing in 1984; The Coast of Utopia in 2007; and Leopoldstadt in 2023.

Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee said the secret of his plays was their "mixture of language, knowledge and feeling. It's those three things in gear together which make him so remarkable."

The writer was born Tomáš Sträussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlin in what was then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. His father was a doctor for the Bata shoe company, and when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939, the family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory.

In late 1941, as Japanese forces closed in on the city state, Tomáš, his brother and their mother fled again, this time to India. His father stayed behind and later died when his ship was attacked as he tried to leave Singapore.

In 1946, his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to threadbare postwar Britain. The eight-year-old Tom "put on Englishness like a coat," he later said, growing up to be a quintessential Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare.

He didn't go to university but began his career, at the age of 17, as a journalist at newspapers in Bristol, southwest England, and then as a theatre critic for Scene magazine in London.