Tom Stoppard – a wordsmith par excellence

Tom Stoppard, one of Britain’s cleverest playwrights has died at the age of 88. His writing was witty and playful, he took ideas seriously and delighted in philosophical and political argument. He was a writer who managed to combine an intellectual’s delight in complexity with an entertainer’s talent for having fun. “Stoppardian” became shorthand for rapid-fire wit, shimmering wordplay and bathetic juxtaposition.’

An early success on stage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was followed by thirty years of prolific output on stage with Arcadia and Jumpers amongst others and screenplays including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. He wrote the adaptation of John le Carré’s The Russia House, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and became the go-to writer for blockbusters in need of a bit of spit and polish (including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the Star Wars adventure Revenge of the Sith).

  He was born Tomas Straussler on 3 July 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, where his Jewish father worked as a doctor for the Bata shoe company. His parents fled from imminent Nazi occupation when he was still a baby and went to Singapore, where his father died in a Japanese prison camp. Tom and his mother and brother had escaped ahead of the Japanese invasion and went first to Australia, later to India. There his mother met and married an Englishman, a Major Stoppard.

 He had a Cancer Sun and Mercury square a forced-to-be-self-reliant Saturn in Aries; with his Sun trine a determined Mars in Scorpio, sextile a creative Neptune in Virgo – and his Uranus in a creative trine to Neptune and a risk-taking opposition to Mars.  Imaginative and artistic, attention-seeking, adventurous, he also had a super-confident Jupiter opposition Pluto which was trine/sextile Venus Algol in Taurus.

  He was married three times and had various relationships with Felicity Kendal and Sinead Cusack amongst others.

  He only discovered when his mother died in the 1990s and with the fall of communism what had happened to his family, with all four grandparents dying in Auschwitz – that plus his father’s death may be part of his Venus Algol conjunction.  

 His creative 5th and 7^th harmonics were strong, even more so was his writers 21^st harmonic and his global-renown 22H.   

“Like Samuel Beckett, but with much better jokes.”

“Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, playwright of dazzling wit who turned high concepts into hits.”