Playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard, 88, died on Nov. 29. Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard grew up in England; his father died in the war (Kenneth Stoppard was his stepfather). His most famous plays—often brimming with witty and deep dialogue and touching on social issues of the day—included Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, and Leopoldstadt; he also wrote the screenplays for such films as Brazil, Empire of the Sun, The Russia House, Billy Bathgate, Shakespeare in Love, and Enigma. Stoppard told The Paris Review, “In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness. I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.”
