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Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. He received an English education in India, to which his family had fled to avoid the Japanese invasion of Singapore. His father was killed during this exodus, and his mother married a British army major named Stoppard, who gave the boy his Anglo-Saxon surname. The family moved to England.
Stoppard left school at seventeen and began work as a journalist. By 1960 he had completed his first play A Walk on the Water, which was later produced as Enter a Free Man.
One of Stoppard's most famous works is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a comedic play which casts two minor characters from HamletThe Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare and one of his most well-known and oft-quoted plays. Written between 1598 and the summer of 1602, this masterpiece of Elizabethan theatre first appeared in print in 1603 in a ver as its leads but with the same lack of power to affect their world or exterior circumstances as they have in ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare born April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564; died April 23, 1616 ( O. May 3, 1616 ( N. has a reputation as the greatest writer the English language has ever known. Indeed, the English Renaissance has often been called "the age of Shakespe's original. Hamlet's role is similarly reversed in terms of his stage time and lines, but it is in his wake that the heroes drift helplessly toward their inevitable demise. Rather than shaping events, they pass the time playing witty word games and pondering the hows, wheres, whys and whos of their predicament. It is similar in many ways to Samuel BeckettThis article is about the playwright. See Quantum Leap for the lead character of that television series. Samuel Barclay Beckett ( April 13, 1906 December 22, 1989) was an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimali's absurdist Waiting for GodotWaiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, written in the late 1940s and first published in 1952. Beckett originally wrote Godot in French, his second language, as En attendant Godot (literally: While Waiting for Godot . The simplicity of t particularly in the main characters' lack of purpose and comprehension of their situation.
Stoppard's plays are plays of ideas that deal with philosophical issues, yet he combines the philosophical ideas he presents with verbal wit and visual humor. His linguistic complexity, with its puns, jokes, innuendo, and other wordplay, is a chief characteristic of his work. Many also feature multiple timelines.
By 1977, Stoppard had become concerned with human rights issues, in particular with the situation of political dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In February 1977, he visited Russia with a member of Amnesty International. In June, Stoppard met Vladimir Bukovsky in London and travelled to Czechoslovakia (then under communist control), where he met Václav Havel, at that time a dissident playwright. Stoppard became involved with Index On Censorship , Amnesty International, and the Committee against Psychiatric Abuse and wrote various newspaper articles and letters about human rights. Stoppard was also intrumental in translating Havel's works into English.
One of Stoppard's most unusual works is Every Good Boy Deserves Favour . It was written at the request of André Previn and was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg . The play calls for a small cast, but also a full orchestra, which not only provides music throughout the play but also forms an essential part of the action. The play concerns a dissident under an oppressive regime (obviously meant to be taken for a Soviet controlled state) who is imprisoned in a mental hospital, from which he will not be released until he admits that his statements against the government were caused by a (non-existent) mental disorder.
In Dogg's Hamlet we find the actors speaking a language called Dogg, which consists of ordinary English words but with meanings completely different from the ones we assign them. Three schoolchildren are rehearsing a performance of Hamlet in English, which is to them a foreign language. Cahoot's Macbeth is usually performed with Dogg's Hamlet, and shows a performance of Macbeth carried out under the eyes of a secret policeman who suspects the actors of subversion against the state.
The Real Inspector Hound is one of his best-known short plays. In it two theatre critics are watching a ridiculous send up of a Country House Murder Mystery, and become involved in the action by accident, causing a series of events that parallel the play they are watching.
The Invention of Love (1997) investigates the life and death of Oxford poet and classicist A. E. Housman, particularly dealing with his homosexuality.
Other plays include Night and Day, and Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1976).
In his early years Stoppard wrote extensively for BBC radio, in many cases introducing a touch of surrealism. Some of his better known radio works include: If You're Glad, I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, The Dog it was that Died, and Artist Descending a Staircase, a story told by means of multiple levels of nested flashback. He returned to the medium for In the Native State (1991), a story set both in colonial India and present-day England, and examines the relationship of the two countries. Stoppard later expanded the work to become the stage play Indian Ink (1995).
Tom Stoppard has written extensively for film and television. Some of his better known scripts and adaptations include Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Enigma . He has also adapted many of his own plays for film and TV, notably the 1990 production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the script of Brazil in 1985, and won one in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love. He is currently working on the script for the upcoming His Dark Materials movie. He was appointed CBE in 1978 and knighted in 1997. He has been co-opted into the Outrapo group. He has been married twice, to Jose Ingle (1965-72), a nurse, and to Miriam Moore-Robinson, (1972-92), whom he left to begin a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He has two sons from each marriage.
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