A brief biographical note
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Tomas Straussler, now known as Tom Stoppard, was born on July 3, 1937 in Zlin, Czechoslovakia. The younger son of a doctor for the Bata shoe company, he moved with his family to Singapore in 1939 to avoid the growing dangers of the Second World War. In 1942, after Eugene Straussler was killed during the Japanese invasion, Tom, his mother and brother were evacuated to India. Four years later, Martha Straussler married an officer in the British army, Kenneth Stoppard. The boys took their stepfather's surname, and the family moved to England. Stoppard spoke only Czech for the first three to five years of his life. (Accounts vary.) In Darjeeling, India, he attended an American-run, English-language school with a diverse student body. At the age of 17, having completed his "A" levels in England, he became a "cub" reporter for the the Western Daily Press in Bristol, spending the next six years as a full-time journalist, writing film and theatre criticism, among other assignments. He quit in 1960 to pursue his own writing and began a stage play, A Walk on the Water. During the next four years, Stoppard served briefly as a drama critic for the soon-defunct magazine Scene, sold three short stories to Faber & Faber, earned a commission for a novel, had two 15-minute radio plays -- The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and 'M' is for Moon Among Other Things -- produced by the BBC, wrote five episodes for the television serial "The Dales" and was invited to West Berlin for a five-month colloquium under the auspices of the Ford Foundation. The first draft of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was writen during Stoppard's German sojourn, and the Royal Shakespeare Company took an option on a revised version in 1965. That year, Stoppard married Jose Ingle, a nurse who lived in his neighborhood, and did further script work for the BBC. 1966 was the year Stoppard's career was well and truly launched. In February, the BBC broadcast the one-act radio play If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, and in May, Stoppard's adaptation of Mrozek's Tango debuted at the RSC. Within weeks of each other, Stoppard's novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, was published and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to overwhelming acclaim. Because the RSC had allowed its option on the play lapse, Laurence Olivier's National Theatre was able to snap up the rights for the London production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It debuted on April 11, 1967 at the Old Vic. From this point, Stoppard's career is best charted through a study of the plays themselves, rather than through personal anecdotes (which, for the moment anyhow, seem hard to come by). Divorced from Jose Ingle in 1972, Stoppard married Dr. Miriam Moore-Robinson, then a medical director for a company specializing in birth-control research and later a popular panelist on the BBC's quiz show, "Call My Bluff." They divorced in 1992. Stoppard has four children, sons Oliver, Barnaby, William and Edmund. A large collection of Stoppard's papers, including play drafts and business correspondence, are available for study at the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Additional Online Information The following articles contain general information about Stoppard and his career. Sources Back to TRAVESTIES: The Stagecraft of Tom Stoppard Back to CHEAP IRONIES Last modified 4/26/04 by Michael Berry
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