Tom Stoppard, who penned Shakespeare In Love, dies

United Agents said on Saturday the Czech-born Stoppard - often hailed as the greatest British playwright of his generation - died "peacefully" at his home in Dorset in southwest 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," they said.

"It was an honor to work with Tom and to know him."

Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger was among those paying tribute, calling Stoppard "a giant of the English theatre, both highly intellectual and very funny in all his plays and scripts.

"He had a dazzling wit and loved classical and popular music alike which often featured in his huge body of work," said Jagger, who produced the 2001 film Enigma, with a screenplay by Stoppard.

"He was amusing and quietly sardonic. A friend and companion and I will always miss him."

King Charles said Stoppard was "a dear friend who wore his genius lightly".

Theatres in London's West End will dim their lights for two minutes on Tuesday in tribute.

Over a six-decade career, 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.

The writer was born Tomás Sträussler in 1937 to a Jewish family in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia.

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, Tomas, 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.

In 1946 his mother married an English officer, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to 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 began his career, aged 17, as a journalist on newspapers in Bristol, southwest England, and then as a theatre critic for Scene magazine in London.

He wrote plays for radio and television including A Walk on the Water, and made his stage breakthrough with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which reimagined Shakespeare's Hamlet from the viewpoint of two hapless minor characters.

It premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 and was staged at Britain's National Theatre, then run by Laurence Olivier, before moving to Broadway.

A stream of exuberant, innovative plays followed, including The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, and Travesties, which set intellectuals including James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin colliding in Zurich during World War I.

Musical drama Every Good Boy Deserves Favor was a collaboration with composer Andre Previn about a Soviet dissident confined to a mental institution - part of Stoppard's long involvement with groups advocating for human rights groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The Invention of Love explored classical literature and the mysteries of the human heart through the life of the English poet AE Housman.

He wrote The Coast of Utopia, an epic trilogy about pre-revolutionary Russian intellectuals, and drew on his own background for Rock 'n' Roll, which contrasted the fates of the 1960s counterculture in Britain and in Communist Czechoslovakia.

A champion of free speech but Stoppard claimed not to have strong political views: "One writes because one loves writing, really".

Biographer Lee said his "very funny, witty plays" contained a "sense of underlying grief".

That was especially true of his late play Leopoldstadt, which drew on his own family's story for the tale of a Jewish Viennese family over the first half of the 20th century.

Stoppard began thinking of his personal link to the Holocaust quite late in life, only discovering after his mother's death in 1996 that all four grandparents had died in concentration camps.

"It would be misleading to see me as somebody who blithely and innocently, at the age of 40-something, thought, 'Oh, my goodness, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family,'" he told The New Yorker in 2022.

"Of course I knew, but I didn't know who they were. And I didn't feel I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn't really true."

Leopoldstad opened in Broadway in late 2022, going on to win four Tonys.

Dizzyingly prolific, Stoppard also wrote many radio plays, a novel, television series including Parade's End and many film screenplays.

These included dystopian Terry Gilliam comedy Brazi, Steven Spielberg-directed war drama Empire of the Sun, Elizabethan romcom Shakespeare in Love - for which he and Marc Norman shared a best adapted screenplay Oscar - code breaking thriller Enigma and Russian epic Anna Karenina.

He also wrote and directed a 1990 film adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and translated numerous works into English.

Stoppard was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 for his services to literature.

He was married three times: to Jose Ingle, Miriam Stern — better known as the health journalist Dr Miriam Stoppard - and TV producer Sabrina Guinness. He is survived by four children, including the actor Ed Stoppard, and several grandchildren.

Australian Associated Press