Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler and who lived from 1937 to 2025, was a British playwright and screenwriter who fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a child and eventually settled in England. He became internationally recognized for intellectually sophisticated plays blending wit and comedy with philosophical concepts, exploring human rights, censorship and political freedom, and earned comparisons to Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw as one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. His major plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Arcadia (1993), The Coast of Utopia (2002) and Leopoldstadt (2020), and he also achieved success in screenwriting, winning an Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love (1998) and writing Empire of the Sun (1987) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).