Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

The British dramatist Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. In 1939, as the Nazis invaded, the Straussler family fled to Singapore, and then to Darjeeling, India, after the 1942 Japanese invasion, which his father, a doctor, did not survive. In 1945, Stoppard’s mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British officer, and moved the family with him to England. During the 1950s, Stoppard worked as a journalist and a writer of radio plays. He began publishing and producing his own plays in the 1960s. His works are marked by their absurdist and often political tragicomedy. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Stoppard served as a prominent advocate for dissidents in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. He was knighted in 1997; he has received four Tony Awards for Best Play and an Academy Award for best original screenplay.