British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, known for ‘Shakespeare in Love’ and award-winning stage works, dies peacefully at home in Dorset, England.
Tom Stoppard, the British playwright and screenwriter whose works spanned stage, radio, and film, has died on Saturday November 29, 2025, at the age of 88, his talent agency United Agents confirmed. Stoppard passed away peacefully at his Dorset home, surrounded by family.
Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, in what is now the Czech Republic, Stoppard’s early life was shaped by flight from Nazi-occupied Europe. His family, of secular Jewish background, escaped first to Singapore and later to Australia and India. After the death of his father, his mother remarried an Englishman, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family settled in the United Kingdom, where Tomas adopted the surname Stoppard. Many of his extended family members were killed in the Holocaust.
Stoppard rose to international prominence with his 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a metatheatrical retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which won him his first Tony Award in 1968. He later earned widespread acclaim in the United States for co-writing the Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, alongside Marc Norman. Norman described Stoppard as “a joy to work with,” praising his understanding of Shakespeare as an entertainer and his gift for storytelling.
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In 2023, Stoppard won his fifth Tony Award for Leopoldstadt, a play tracing a Jewish family in Vienna from the 1890s through World War II. The work drew on his own personal history and marked a late-career turn toward exploring his family’s experiences during the Holocaust. “It’s been at the back of my mind,” he told reporters in 2022. “It felt like unfinished business.”
Beyond the theatre, Stoppard’s contributions extended to film and radio, including the screenplay for Anna Karenina (2012), Terry Gilliam’s satirical Brazil, and the 1987 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.
King Charles III, whose mother Queen Elizabeth knighted Stoppard in 1997, described him as “one of our greatest writers” and “a dear friend who wore his genius lightly.” Charles extended condolences to Stoppard’s family, recalling the playwright’s wit and literary influence, and quoted his immortal line: “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
Stoppard’s legacy endures in his prolific body of work, characterized by sharp wit, profound human insight, and a deep engagement with language and history. United Agents called him “beloved for his brilliance, wit, irreverence, and generosity of spirit,” noting that it was “an honor to work with Tom and to know him.”
