Stoppard, Tom

Playwright Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, on July 3, 1937. However, he lived in Czechoslovakia only until 1939, when his family moved to Singapore. Stoppard, his mother, and his older brother were evacuated to India shortly before the Japanese invasion of Singapore in 1941; his father, Eugene Straussler, remained behind and was killed. In 1946, Stoppard's mother, Martha, married British army officer Kenneth Stoppard and the family moved to England, eventually settling in Bristol.

Stoppard left school at the age of seventeen and began working as a journalist, first with the Western Daily Press (1954-58) and then with the Bristol Evening World (1958-60). Having developed a specialization in film and theatre criticism, in 1960 Stoppard became a free-lance journalist, writing critical articles and, for the Daily Press, two pseudonymous weekly columns. By the end of the year, he had completed his first full-length play, A Walk on the Water (later produced on stage in 1968 as Enter a Free Man ), and acquired an agent, Kenneth Ewing of Fraser and Dunlop Scripts. He also wrote a short piece, The Gamblers, which was eventually performed by the University of Bristol drama department in 1965. Stoppard has referred to this as his first play in that he claims A Walk on the Water was an unoriginal composite of several plays he admired. Over the next few years, Stoppard wrote various works for radio, television, and the theatre. Among these were M Is for Moon among Other Things (1964), A Separate Peace (1966), and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (1966). A Walk on the Water had been broadcast on ITV Television in 1963 and on BBC-TV in 1964, and Stoppard wrote many episodes of the radio serial A Student's Diary: An Arab in London (1966-67). In addition, three short stories were published by Faber and Faber in the anthology, Introduction 2: Stories by New Writers (1964).

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