Tom Stoppard was born Tom Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937. His family moved to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis. Then, shortly before the Japanese invasion of Singapore in 1941, young Tom fled to Darjeeling, India with his mother and brother. His father, however, Eugene Straussler, remained behind and was killed during the invasion. In 1946, the family emigrated to England after Tom's mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British army.

He was catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights when Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967 and subsequently ran in New York after its first production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966.  It is now considered a modern classic.  Stoppard’s “takes” on Shakespeare also include two one-acts, Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979).  He also wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (1998) and is widely perceived as a virtuoso master of clever language.

Before his success as a playwright, Stoppard was a reporter and drama critic for Western Daily Press, the Bristol Evening World and Scene, a literary journal, occupations he parodied in The Real Inspector Hound (1968), a play in which two theatre critics are lured from the audience onto the stage of a murder mystery and quickly become corpses.

Broadway audiences probably know him from such works as Travesties (1974), Arcadia (1993) and, more recently, The Invention of Love (1997) and Jumpers (2004).