Tom Stoppard Essay, Research Paper

known as Tom Stoppard, was born on July 3, 1937 in Zlin, Czechoslovakia. The youngest son of a doctor for the Bata shoe company, he moved with his family to Singapore in 1939 to escape the dangers World War II. In 1942 Tom’s father, Eugene Straussler was killed in the war. Tom and his remaining family were evacuated to India. Four years later, Tom’s mother, Martha, married an officer in the British army, Kenneth Stoppard. Tomas took his new stepfather’s surname, and the family moved to England.

At the age of 17, having completed his education in England, he became a reporter for the the Western Daily Press in Bristol, spending the next six years as a journalist, writing film and theater criticism. He quit in 1960 to write his first play, A Walk on the Water. During the next four years, Stoppard served briefly as a drama critic for a magazine, sold three short stories, wrote a novel, had two 15-minute radio plays produced by the BBC, and wrote five episodes for a television series.

The first draft of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was written while Stoppard visited Germany, and there the Royal Shakespeare Company produced a revised version in 1965. That year, Stoppard married Jose Ingle, a nurse who lived in his neighborhood, and did further script work for the BBC.

1966 was the year Stoppard’s career was well and truly launched. In February, the BBC broadcast one of Tom Stoppard’s one act plays. Within weeks of each other, Stoppard’s novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, was published and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to overwhelming acclaim. Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre was able to sieze the rights for the London production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It debuted on April 11, 1967 at the Old Vic.

Divorced from Jose Ingle in 1972, Stoppard married Dr. Miriam Moore-Robinson. Stoppard has four sons- Oliver, Barnaby, William and Edmund.

Since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was first debuted, Stoppard has writen several plays, scripts, and short stories which have all been moderately successful. He has recently come once again under limelight after his novel, Shakespeare in Love hit the big screen.