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
I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.
Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.
Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.
I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.
It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ... a most fitting award.
Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it
I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.
I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.
Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.
Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.