Playwright: Tom Stoppard

Born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, his family moved to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis. When the Japanese overran the island state during the war, Doctor Straussler sent his family to India but stayed behind himself and died in a prison camp. Tom's mother later married a British army officer, Kenneth Stoppard. The family came to England in 1946. Tom Stoppard left school at seventeen and began his writing career as a journalist. His first …

…All this can be done for a fraction of what it would cost to do the same in film. But in every case the audience has to be attracted, and its attention held, by the means of sound alone. "Plays are never quite finished, really; you just abandon them when you run out of time, until you do them again." -- Tom Stoppard from an interview with Thomas O'Connor in the Orange County Register, 2 April 1989.