Bubblecar said:

dv said:

Tom Stoppard, acclaimed British playwright, has died, aged 88.

Some of his noted plays and films are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, The Real Thing, Shakespeare in Love, Brazil, Billy Bathgate, Empire of the Sun, and Enigma.

Another one of these new and innovative young things who suddenly turned out to be very old in the end. Well done.

Interestingly enough, he was born Tomáš Sträussler.

Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler, in Zlín, a city dominated by the shoe manufacturing industry, in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. He was the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Sträussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. His parents were non-observant Jews. Just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the town’s patron, Jan Antonín Baťa, transferred his Jewish employees, mostly physicians, to branches of his firm outside Europe. On 15 March 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Sträussler family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory.

Before the Japanese occupation of Singapore, Stoppard, his brother, and their mother fled to British India. Stoppard’s father volunteered to remain in Singapore, knowing that as a doctor he would be needed in its defence. When Stoppard was four years old, his father died. The writer long believed that his father had perished in Japanese captivity, as a prisoner of war. The book Tom Stoppard in Conversation describes this, but the author later revealed the subsequent discovery that his father had been reporteddrowned after the ship he was aboard was bombed by Japanese forces, as he tried to flee Singapore in 1942. In 1941, when Tomáš was five, he, his brother Petr, and their mother had been evacuated to Darjeeling, India. The boys attended Mount Hermon School, an American multi-racial school, where the brothers became Tom and Peter.

In 1945, his mother, Martha, married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British Army. Kenneth adopted her children and the family moved to Nottingham, England in 1946. In Nottingham, Stoppard was “warmly welcomed” by his stepfather’s family and he later noted that by this point in his life “English was my only language. Suddenly I was an English schoolboy.” Stoppard once wrote that his upbringing in England led him to become “an honorary Englishman”, and stated that “I fairly often find I’m with people who forget I don’t quite belong in the world we’re in. I find I put a foot wrong—it could be pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history—and suddenly I’m there naked, as someone with a pass, a press ticket.” This is reflected in his characters, he observed, who are “constantly being addressed by the wrong name, with jokes and false trails to do with the confusion of having two names.” Stoppard attended the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire, and later completed his education at Pocklington School in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Pocklington School built the Tom Stoppard Theatre in his name, which he opened in May 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Stoppard