Dead Pool 2025

[Tonitrus]

RIP Todd Snider.  Sounds like he had a really rough final few weeks.

My favorite version of my favorite song of his:

https://youtu.be/kaYihBvuGsw?t=23

[Solmyr]

RIP Udo Kier.

[Syt]

[Sheilbh]

Oh RIP Sir Tom Stoppard One of the best playwrights writing in my lifetime. Been to see a few of his plays and not been disappointed (although possibly because I've always been to revivals not first runs ).

Also I find his personal background very interesting and it's not mentioned herebut I think he was involved in Charter 77 and Amnesty.

Sir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright
A popular and exotic figure, Stoppard was known for his dandyish appearance as well as his wit and eloquence
Saturday November 29 2025, 6.00pm, The Times
Comedy

Tom Stoppard in 1994, aged 57
BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

With his Jim Morrison mane and Mick Jagger pout, Tom Stoppard looked more like a brooding rock star than one of Britain's most critically acclaimed and commercially popular playwrights. Although he came to prominence at a time of excitement in the theatre when John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter were producing some of their best work, and the generation of David Hare and David Edgar was emerging, his writing and his concerns were utterly distinctive and personal. And just as every cultured person more or less knows what is meant by Pinteresque, so the adjective Stoppardian entered the language as a shorthand for wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence.

Incorporating multiple timelines and visual humour, his work was generally optimistic and good-natured at a time when others were investigating squalor, degradation, silence and anomie. "I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours," he explained.

He rarely aimed for realism, least of all the gritty kind. His theatre is a place of carnival, where the extraordinary happens and ideas are taken to absurd logical extremes, and he had a wonderful ability to combine disparate elements beneath a dazzling surface. In his early career he was criticised, after the immense success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Jumpers, for failing to portray people convincingly and for the lack of social conscience. His reply was that much of his dialogue was "simply stuff which I've ping-ponged between me and myself".

"I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown," he said, "and I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself."

Accordingly, his younger years were amusing and productive, but as he grew older part of him was determined to write about darker matters, and to investigate what he really thought and felt. He was genuinely interested in the life of his times, but in its intellectual rather than its social manifestations.

For his own part Stoppard affected indifference to his high reputation. In 2010, when asked what he thought Stoppardian meant, he said "another hapless, feckless, fatuous episode in my life, brought on by my own forgetfulness or incompetence".

He was born Tomas Straussler in 1937, the younger son of Eugen, a doctor employed by Bata shoes, and Martha in Zlin in Czechoslovakia. The exotic way he rolled his Rs as he spoke hinted at his Bohemian origins. The family moved to Singapore two years later to escape the threat of Nazism (a great-grandparent was Jewish), only to find themselves in danger again, in 1942, from the Japanese invasion. His mother took him to India while his father stayed behind, only to be killed in a Japanese bombing raid.

After the war, his mother married a British army officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, and returned to England with her two sons, who took their stepfather's name. Tom went to boarding schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, the latter of which, Pocklington, he hated.

He left school at 17 to become a reporter for the Western Daily Press. Four years later he moved to the Bristol Evening World, where he stayed until 1960. It was during this period that he worked, he claimed, as the only motoring correspondent who could not drive. "I used to review the upholstery," he said. He was also a second-string theatre critic.

He continued to work as a freelance journalist until 1963, when his first play, A Walk on the Water, was produced on television. He then devoted himself to full-time writing, which meant living in some poverty — though not without flamboyance — until, in 1967, his fortunes were transformed by the popularity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The play's premiere had been given by an Oxford University drama group at the Edinburgh Fringe the previous year, and after a favourable review it was snapped up by Kenneth Tynan for the National Theatre at the Old Vic, where it stayed in repertory for four years. It was also seen on Broadway and in translation around the world.

The task of translation must have been made harder by the piece's dependence upon recognition of Shakespeare's lines. The play is a kind of backstage Hamlet, in which the leading players become bit parts and the minor characters take the key roles, finding, as in the tragedy, that their world has been turned inside out. A further clever conceit is Stoppard's identification of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a Hamlet for the 20th century. The dialogue of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a comic take on that of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, which had been the theatrical revelation of the previous decade; and just as these anti-heroes are assimilated by Stoppard, so are the enigmatic Prince and the elusive Mr Godot.

Beckett never saw or read Stoppard's play, but the next best thing was a friendly telegram from another playwright, Pinter. It was signed "PINTA" and Stoppard recalled: "I thought that in some curious way it was connected with the Milk Marketing Board."

In 1968 A Walk on the Water was recycled for the stage as Enter a Free Man, a minor piece, and The Real Inspector Hound opened at the Criterion Theatre in the West End. Inspector Hound is an ingenious satire on the traditional murder mystery, in which two theatre critics become entangled. Stoppard pokes fond fun at the mechanics of the genre, as when Mrs Drudge answers a phone she happens to be dusting with the ultra-informative words: "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring."

Three years later, the one-act After Magritte showed Stoppard's talents for wordplay and for brilliantly surreal but infallibly logical plotting. These were to reach their height in 1972 in Jumpers, a play about a moral philosopher wrestling to demonstrate that there are objective values while his wife, a musical comedy star, suffers a breakdown and his university becomes a sort of intellectual gymnasium.

At one point, for entirely evident reasons, the philosopher answers the door to a policeman while covered in shaving foam and holding a tortoise, with the words: "I'm sorry, I was expecting a psychiatrist."

Jumpers was a huge success, being at once entertaining and cerebral. In Stoppard's rollicking style it addresses a profound question and the author's sympathies are clearly with the flailing philosopher, but the treatment itself is facetious even when Stoppard is deploring the unseriousness of trendy academia. Like most of his pieces it is something of an exercise. Very often, Stoppard's lines are designed for a palpable but momentary effect: in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for instance, Rosencrantz idly muses on the growth of the fingernails after death solely as a cue for the convulsingly theatrical line: "The toenails, on the other hand, never grow at all."

Between major plays, Stoppard wrote one-acters, scripts for radio and television (including a version of Three Men in a Boat, starring Michael Palin), film scripts (including Graham Greene's The Human Factor and JG Ballard's Empire of the Sun), and translations and adaptations (Federico Garcia Lorca, Arthur Schnitzler, Anton Chekhov). He also contributed anonymously to Steven Spielberg scripts, which were sent to him privately. Some of these seemed to be chips from the workshop, but all contained memorably hilarious lines.

His next stage play was Travesties (1975), in which Lenin, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and James Joyce meet in Zurich during the First World War and become involved in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Again, Stoppard was spurred or enabled to write by a classic work, already familiar to his audience, around which he played his variations and cerebral games.

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979) also used this technique, spinning ideas (this time out of Wittgenstein, about the nature of language) around an immediately recognisable framework. When he attempted something freestanding, as in Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1976) or Night and Day (1978), the results were less happy. In 1980 he admitted that some of the excitement of the theatre had worn thin, saying: "When I started, I wrote a play because I wanted to be a playwright. Now I write plays because I am a playwright." He was by now one of the most successful in the world, and in 1979 he became "lord" of Iver Grove, a Palladian-style house in Buckinghamshire.

In that year he also wrote Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a play with full on-stage orchestra, with music by André Previn. This remarkable hybrid concerned the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, and featured a sane man put in a mental hospital for saying that sane men were being put in mental hospitals. This was the kind of ramifying conundrum on which Stoppard had always thrived, but now the comedy was poignant because the pressing truth was so tragic.

Stoppard had now exhausted the vein of travesty, and his significant output slowed considerably, with perhaps a really good new play emerging each decade. One answer to his dependency problem was to adapt little-known foreign work. Undiscovered Country (1979) was from Arthur Schnitzler; On the Razzle (1981), at the National Theatre with Felicity Kendal playing the lead, was a sublimely funny, fast-moving version of a comedy by Johann Nestroy. Rough Crossing, at the National in 1984, was adapted from Ferenc Molnar, and concerned the writing of a Broadway musical set on a ship by a composer and its two stars as they are sailing to New York. This was Stoppard's "sine qua nonchalance" at its best.

His most substantial plays of the 1980s and 1990s were The Real Thing, Arcadia and The Invention of Love. The title of The Real Thing (1982) referred to the sincerity or otherwise of art and love, but also contained a defence of language used well which may be taken as an attack on the use of blunt propaganda in the theatre by some of Stoppard's more radical contemporaries.

Whether the play itself was the real thing or merely a tale of adultery among theatre folk, with Stoppard's fizzing language disguising some fairly trite comparisons, is hard to say. Reality took a bow shortly afterwards when Stoppard and his leading lady, Kendal, left their respective spouses for each other. He would later describe her as his muse. She starred successively in On the Razzle, Jumpers, Hapgood, Arcadia and Indian Ink (which drew on her early years in India) at the National or in the West End.

Arcadia (1993) was classic Stoppard: a story of love and literature, philosophy and coincidence. Ranging from the age of Byron to that of chaos theory, it combined the suspense of The Aspern Papers with the excitement of the most speculative modern science. "It's the best possible time to be alive," declares one character in the present, "when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong." Like his characters, Stoppard was dancing for joy at what lesser minds would find a frightening prospect. For him, the infinite permutations of life were a cause for celebration.

The Invention of Love (1997) was a far more sombre piece: a profile of AE Housman as a classicist who has perhaps failed to seize the day. Once again, Stoppard had done his research, and transformed it into something much more remarkable than a critical biography. Set on the banks of the Isis and the Styx, the play had coincidental appearances in Stoppard's most elastic manner by Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Jowett and Frank Harris; yet the staging was unrelievedly drab. There was pathos and an impassioned speech about the importance of truth, and the run was a sell-out, but audiences probably left the theatre knowing more than they cared to about the editing of Latin poetry.

Stoppard's care for English had something in common with Housman's care for Latin. It was not his first language — he had spoken only Czech until he was taught English at school in India at the age of five — and he seemed to interrogate language rather than merely use it. Of all his interests, ranging from cricket to mathematics, the tricks of language was the most absorbing.

Between stage work, Stoppard continued writing for the cinema and won an Oscar for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, a witty and entertaining piece in which the young Will (Joseph Fiennes) falls for Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), the daughter of a wealthy merchant.

Stoppard shared the writing credit with an American screenwriter, Marc Norman, who had the idea for the film in the 1980s. Norman's draft screenplay failed to impress and Stoppard was brought in to improve it.

In 2002 came his most ambitious stage work to date, The Coast of Utopia, a sprawling trilogy about Russia's 19th-century romantic exiles, Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev and Mikhail Bakunin, and their intellectual and personal preoccupations. Directed by Trevor Nunn at the National, it had a mixed reception, with even favourable critics finding it uneven and flawed. Revived five years later at the Lincoln Center in New York, it enjoyed a decent run and won seven Tony awards.

In 2006 the Royal Court asked Stoppard for a play to mark the 50th anniversary of the English Stage Company. As Stoppard had no previous connection with the theatre, he was a controversial choice, but Rock 'n' Roll was good enough to win the opposition over. Partly it was about a Czech rock group's ability to challenge an autocratic regime through its music, but it was also a wider discourse on liberty, in Britain as much as in communist eastern Europe.

He spent three years, more or less, working on the well-received TV adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End but then he seemed to slip back into writer's block until 2015 when he produced The Hard Problem, his first script in nine years. The Guardian's critic thought it suffered from "information overload", while the Telegraph deemed it a "major disappointment". If he was upset he hid it well behind a façade of levity. When asked whether he found it difficult to talk about work in progress, he said: "Not at all. I'm normally so thrilled to have had an idea at all I tell everyone, even people who have no interest in hearing."

Four years later it was announced that he had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna, which he described as his most personal play and perhaps his last.

Stoppard's only novel was Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), which he claimed to have written in two days.

He won innumerable theatrical awards, and was appointed CBE in 1978, knighted in 1997 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2000. He gave a number of academic lectures, but they were amusements and insights into his own practice rather than revelations about other writers.

His first wife (1965-72) was Jose Ingle, and his second (1972-92) was Miriam Moore-Robinson, the agony aunt, broadcaster and anti-smoking campaigner (Stoppard was a dedicated smoker). There were two sons by each marriage. Oliver is a postman in Norfolk, having abandoned a doctorate in physics for a simpler life; Barnaby runs a restaurant in London; Ed is a successful Shakespearean actor and Will manages his wife, the celebrated violinist Linzi Stoppard. It was while married to Dr Miriam Stoppard, as she was better known, that he embarked on his affair with Kendal. That ended in 1998 and, 16 years later, he married the television producer and heiress Sabrina Guinness, a one-time It girl and who dated Prince Charles. They lived in Dorset.

Stoppard always claimed that he wasn't engaged enough politically to be able to know where to place himself, on the left or right, yet he and Margaret Thatcher had a soft spot for each other and he once attended a literary dinner held in her honour. Of his politics he said he felt a bit sheepish. It did not stop him becoming one of the founders of the political magazine Standpoint in 2008, just as his own lack of formal university education did not stop him becoming a visiting professor in theatre at Oxford in 2017.

He couldn't wait to be out of education aged 17. "It was years and years before I felt I missed out on something," he said. "I began to have certain kinds of regret about it. There are probably aspects of the autodidact's life that compensate. The thing you have to understand is that, as a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas."

A sense of insecurity and a tendency towards self-deprecation may explain his unwillingness to help posterity by keeping a diary, or indeed most of his papers. "I keep some letters," he said. "I have a couple from Laurence Olivier and one from John Steinbeck, but the rest of my life I destroy as I go along."

And perhaps insecurity, or at least a nervousness about being exposed as an intellectual impostor, may also account for what he called his cheap side, his love of cheap gags: "The days of the digital watch are numbered," as one of his characters says, or "if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music, and of aviation".

His sense of humour even extended to his own obituary. Asked in later life what he imagined the first line of his would be, he replied: "Tom Stoppard, the father of Ed Stoppard, has died."

Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, playwright, was born on July 3, 1937. His death aged 88 was announced on November 29, 2025