One of England's most important playwrights, Tom Stoppard (born 1937) gained a wide international audience. His two great stage successes were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Thing, and his co-written screenplay Shakespeare in Love was both immensely popular and critically acclaimed.

The son of a doctor for the Bata shoe manufacturing company, Thomas Straussler (Stoppard) was born on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia. According to Nazi racial laws there was "Jewish blood" in the family, so his father was transferred to Singapore in 1939, taking the family with him. When the Japanese invaded that city in 1942, the women and children were taken to India. Dr. Straussler stayed behind and was killed.

Stoppard attended an American boarding school in Darjeeling. In 1945 his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British Army major, and both of her sons took his name. The Stoppards went to England, where Stoppard's stepfather worked in the...