Tom Stoppard, the Tony-winning playwright who won an Oscar for the 1988 film Shakespeare in Love, has died. He was 88. United Agents told the Associated Press in a statement on Saturday that Stoppard died “peacefully” at his home in Dorset, England, surrounded by family. He was first launched into the limelight when he debuted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966 at the Edinburgh Festival, which won him a Tony Award for Best Play. His other Tony-winning plays are Travesties, The Real Thing, and The Coast of Utopia. He also wrote the 1987 film Empire of the Sun and helped write Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (2005). Mick Jaggar remembered him in a post on X as his “favourite playwright,” sharing a couple of photos with Stoppard. Piers Morgan also posted on X to pay tribute, calling Stoppard “one of the world’s greatest dramatists.” The playwright was born July 3, 1937, in then-Zlín, Czechoslovakia. His Jewish family fled from the Nazis, and he attended boarding school in the Indian Himalayas before settling in the U.K. after World War II.
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