Oscar-winning British playwright Tom Stoppard dies aged 88

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00:00Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?

00:03I bear witness to the wager and will be the judge of it as occasion arises.

00:10Tom Stoppard is perhaps best known for co-writing an Elizabethan rom-com.

00:16Mark Norman, Tom Stoppard for Shakespeare in Love.

00:21He and Mark Norman won a Best Original Oscar for the film

00:24and a Writers Guild of America award, among others.

00:27I still feel a little bit like that import from the London theatre.

00:31You know, we get Nicole Kidman, you get me, that's how it works.

00:35Thank you very much.

00:38That, however, was a tiny part of what was a prolific career.

00:43Aside writing for films, Tom Stoppard wrote dozens of plays for stage, radio and television.

00:48Coming to prominence with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in 1966.

00:54That play reimagines Shakespeare from the point of view of two minor characters in Hamlet.

01:00Daniel Radcliffe and Joshua Maguire starred in the play in London in 2017.

01:05And as Josh said, we are two characters that really, really, really don't want to die.

01:09Mm.

01:10The Guardian newspaper said that each new Stoppard play after that was an international event.

01:17Stoppard was born Thomas Straussler to a Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic.

01:22His family fled when Nazi Germany invaded.

01:25In his career, he became a champion for free speech,

01:28working with such organizations as Index on Censorship.

01:30He spoke out in December 2010 as a supporter of the Belarus Theatre

01:35to protest against a crackdown on the opposition in the country.

01:39To add to a shelf full of theatre awards,

01:42there was one from Queen Elizabeth that made him Sir Tom Stoppard

01:47for services to literature for a person often hailed as the greatest playwright of his generation.

01:52Oh, well, I mean...

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