Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screen writer.
Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-British playwright and screenwriter whose work for the stage from the 1960s onward made him one of the most-honored English-language dramatists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was born Tomáš Sträussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family. His family fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 ahead of the German occupation; his father was killed during the Japanese invasion of Singapore in 1942, and his mother later married a British army officer named Kenneth Stoppard, whose surname Tomáš took.
He grew up in England, left school at 17, and worked as a journalist for the Western Daily Press in Bristol. His 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead — which retells Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters — premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and transferred to the Old Vic, where it won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play. Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974, Tony Award for Best Play), and The Real Thing (1982, Tony Award for Best Play) followed.
His 1993 play Arcadia — set in an English country house in two time periods, exploring chaos theory, Romantic poetry, and the nature of historical knowledge — is widely cited among the major English-language plays of the late 20th century. The Coast of Utopia (2002, Tony Award for Best Play) and Leopoldstadt (2020, Tony Award for Best Play) extended his work into nine-hour Russian-intellectual-history trilogies and into autobiographical Jewish-history terrain.
He has written extensively for film, sharing the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (1998) and adapting Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), and Anna Karenina (2012). He was knighted in 1997 and received the Order of Merit in 2000. He has won the Tony Award for Best Play five times — more than any other playwright.
His name Tom is a short form of Thomas, from the Aramaic T'oma meaning "twin." Stoppard adopted the English name Tom in place of his birth name Tomáš after his family settled in England, and he has carried it through more than six decades of writing for stage and screen.
About the name Tom
Gender: Male · Origin: English
Derives From Thomas Twin.