“Every exit is an entrance somewhere else”
Tom Straussler was born this day in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937. He is 75 years old.
As War World II loomed in Europe his family moved to Singapore to escape the Nazis. In 1941 as the Japanese were poised to invade Singapore he and his mother and brother fled to Darjeeling, India. (His father stayed in the city and was died in the invasion.) After the war they moved to England and his mother remarried. Kenneth Stoppard adopted Tom and his sister.
Stoppard left school when he was only 17 and began to write for local newspapers. He started writing plays and scripts and in 1963 his first television play, A Walk on the Water was produced. Success on the stage came with his hugely popular Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play that looks at Hamlet from the point of view of two minor characters. For the screen he penned Empire of the Sun, Billy Bathgate, and co-wrote Brazil and Shakespeare in Love. He won the “Best Screenplay” Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.
His other works include: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, The Real Thing, Arcadia and Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth
Tom Stoppard on a reception in honour of the premiere of “The Coast of Utopia” in Russia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
ritaLOVEStoWRITE 
July 3rd, 2012 at 9:05 pm
I love Stoppard: acted in Dogg’s Hamlet once. I think acting is the best way to get that wonderful humour of his 🙂