Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSLis a British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth3 July 1937
CityZlin, Czech Republic
It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ... a most fitting award.
With his earliest work he stood alone in British theatre up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers too.
On the one hand, it makes life very difficult for them. On the other hand - and this isn't a recommendation for being a suppressed writer - in their situation now, as with Havel and his friends in the '70s and '80s, the consolation is that your work matters.
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.
I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.
It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth.
the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics and audience.
Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.
I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.
I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.
I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.
I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.
I'm very garrulous, but I don't say anything.
I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.