Tom Stoppard
Birth : 1937-07-03, Zlín, Czechoslovakia
History
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL (born Tomáš Straussler 3 July 1937) is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love and has won one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
In 1939, Stoppard left Czechoslovakia as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright. He has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965–1972) and Miriam Stoppard (1972–1992), and has two sons from each marriage, one of whom is actor Ed Stoppard.
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Writer
Regarded as ‘Britain’s greatest living playwright’ (Times), Tom Stoppard’s critically acclaimed new play Leopoldstadt is a passionate drama of love, family and endurance. At the beginning of the 20th century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, Austria. But Hermann Merz, a factory owner and baptised Jew now married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. We follow his family’s story across half a century, passing through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. A company of 40 actors represent each generation of the family in this epic, but intimate play. Filmed live on stage in London’s West End, ‘Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece is magnificent’ (Independent) and should not be missed. A production from Sonia Friedman Productions.
Himself
Tom Stoppard is perhaps the world’s leading, funniest and cleverest playwright. Ever since he hit the ground running in the 1960s with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, there has always been a streak of melancholy beneath the sparkling surface of his work. Now with his latest play, Leopoldstadt, he comes full circle and faces up to the pain and loss in his past. In this programme, he tells Alan Yentob his extraordinary story.
Self
A documentary on the life and career of one of the most influential film directors of all time, Steven Spielberg.
Screenplay
An artist falls for a married young woman while he's commissioned to paint her portrait. The two invest in the risky tulip market in hopes to build a future together.
Theatre Play
Against the backdrop of Hamlet, two hapless minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, take centre stage. As the young double act stumble their way in and out of the action of Shakespeare’s iconic drama, they become increasingly out of their depth as their version of the story unfolds.
Theatre Play
Acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) returns to the National Theatre with his highly-anticipated new play The Hard Problem, directed by Nicholas Hytner (Othello, Hamlet, One Man, Two Guvnors). Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brainscience institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? This is ‘the hard problem’ which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Is the day coming when the computer and the fMRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.
Screenplay
In Imperial Russia, Anna, the wife of the officer Karenin, goes to Moscow to visit her brother. On the way, she meets the charming cavalry officer Vronsky to whom she is immediately attracted. But in St. Petersburg’s high society, a relationship like this could destroy a woman’s reputation.
Writer
In the years before the First World War, three Britons are drawn into fraught and ultimately tragic relations: Anglican Christopher Tietjens, second son of the lord of the manor of Groby, Yorkshire, who is a disconsolate, Tory statistician in London; Catholic Sylvia Satterthwaite, his promiscuous and self-centered socialite wife who has married him only to hide the fact that their son is not really his; and freethinking Valentine Wannop, a young suffragette and daughter of a lady novelist, who is torn between her idealism and her attraction to "Chrissy". As the war works a profound change on Europe, and Chrissy is badly wounded in France, the conflict shatters and rearranges the lives of all three principals, as well as virtually everyone else in their elite circle.
Self
This absolutely top-notch documentary by Robert Fischer is a fascinating look back at not just the film in question, but Fassbinder's meteoric career which ended all too soon with his untimely death. Archival footage of Fassbinder is utilized (including several fascinating snippets culled from interviews he did at the disastrous Cannes premiere of Despair), as well as many others involved in the film and its release. Even if you're not a particular fan of Despair, or even in fact of Fassbinder, this is stellar documentary film making and is an intriguing look at one of the most enigmatic masters of the New German Cinema.
Self
Sir André Previn, born in Berlin in 1929, figures among the most prominent musicians of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He won four Academy Awards for his film scores, he composes concertos, musicals and operas. He conducts, arranges music, and is a renowned pianist, as well as a jazz musician. Previn’s first opera, ‚A Streetcar Named Desire’, based on Tennessee Williams’ play, successfully premiered in San Francisco, in 1998. Our film mirrors Sir Previn’s affinities to Europe as well as to the United States. He is at home in both worlds, with their rather different cultural realities.
Self
What is this film called Brazil? Find out in this witty documentary.
Screenplay
The story of the WWII project to crack the code behind the Enigma machine, used by the Germans to encrypt messages sent to their submarines.
Screenplay
Private eye Philip Marlowe and his bride move to a desert town, where he uncovers a land scheme.
Screenplay
Young Shakespeare is forced to stage his latest comedy, "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter," before it's even written. When a lovely noblewoman auditions for a role, they fall into forbidden love -- and his play finds a new life (and title). As their relationship progresses, Shakespeare's comedy soon transforms into tragedy.
Author
Shakespeare films Hamlet on a single reel then, after an initial screening, edits it down to the bare bones.
Screenplay
In the year 1935, a teen named Billy Bathgate finds first love while becoming the protégé of fledgling gangster Dutch Schultz.
Writer
Two minor characters from the play "Hamlet" stumble around unaware of their scripted lives and unable to deviate from them.
Director
Two minor characters from the play "Hamlet" stumble around unaware of their scripted lives and unable to deviate from them.
Screenplay
Barley Scott Blair, a Lisbon-based editor of Russian literature who unexpectedly begins working for British intelligence, is commissioned to investigate the purposes of Dante, a dissident scientist trapped in the decaying Soviet Union that is crumbling under the new open-minded policies.
Writer
A fictionalized autobiographical play written by Czechoslovakian playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel in 1984 upon his release from a four-and-one-half-year prison term for political subversion. The play focuses on two days in the life of a dissident writer who is awaiting the knock at the door that may send him to prison.
Writer
Rupert Purvis jumps off a bridge onto a dog, causing problems for Blair, his superior at MI5. Blair must convince Hogbin, the agent who's been tailing Purvis, of which side Purvis is really on--once he finds out what it is.
Screenplay
Jamie Graham, a privileged English boy, is living in Shanghai when the Japanese invade and force all foreigners into prison camps. Jamie is captured with an American sailor, who looks out for him while they are in the camp together. Even though he is separated from his parents and in a hostile environment, Jamie maintains his dignity and youthful spirits, providing a beacon of hope for the others held captive with him.
Screenplay
Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.
Writer
An account of how Lech Walesa and the "Solidarity" trade union confronted the might of Communist dictatorship in Poland.
Writer
When their boss goes off to Vienna to dine with his fiancé, his clerks decide this may be their last chance for an adventure (razzle) and head for the Big City. Zangler must cancel his plans, as his niece has run off with her boyfriend. Naturally, soon everyone is running into everyone else!
Screenplay
A low-ranking Secret Service agent is conned into supplying information to Eastern Bloc countries. Although he is not a suspect due to his unimportant position, when his office partner is hauled in as a suspect he realises he has got himself into very deep water.
Writer
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is a stage play by Tom Stoppard with music by André Previn. It was first performed in 1977. The play criticizes the Soviet practice of treating political dissidence as a form of mental illness.[1] Its title derives from the popular mnemonic used by music students to remember the notes on the lines of the treble clef.
Screenplay
Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.
Writer
Three philosophy professors travel to Prague for a conference. One of them, Anderson, is forced to rethink his ideas on ethics when a former student is arrested by the Czech authorities for writing about individualist approaches to morality.
Alan Clarke's documentary about Soviet writer and dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who had left the Soviet Union in 1976 after years spent in their prisons and psychiatric wards. The film was completed in 1977 but never broadcast, subject only to private screenings. The documentary appears publicly for the first time as a special feature of the BFI's 'Dissent and Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969-1989)' box set, alongside 50 minutes of outtakes.
Writer
The play centres on the figure of Henry Carr, an elderly man who reminisces about Zürich in 1917 during the First World War, and his interactions with James Joyce when he was writing Ulysses, Tristan Tzara during the rise of Dada, and Lenin leading up to the Russian Revolution, all of whom were living in Zürich at that time.
Screenplay
One hot June day, three friends decide there is nothing they would like to do more than to get away from London. A boating holiday with lots of fresh air and exercise would be just the very thing, or so their doctors tell them. So, after debating the merits of hotel or camp beds and what to pack, they set off on their voyage - a trip up the Thames from Henley to Oxford - but very quickly find themselves ill-equipped for the trials of riverbank life.
Writer
A lexicographer's room gets trashed and notes scattered just as he was in the process of compiling a dictionary.
Writer
What is real and what is fiction? Faced with writer's block with his novel, Lewis Fielding turns to a film script about a woman finding herself after his wife Elizabeth returns from Baden Baden. She didn't quite find herself there but had a brief encounter in a lift with a German who says he is a poet. Now the German is in England, gets himself invited to tea where he claims he admires Fielding's books. Which one does he like the best? "Tom Jones." Amused at being confused with the other Fielding, the novelist works the German into the plot.
Writer
An allied agent is sent out into an obscure country to find a Russian Agent who has been thrown out of Russia for defection. He finds a broken man who drowns his days in drink, and feels sympathy for him.
Writer
An early version of Jumpers - nothing happens at random - Doollee
Screenplay
An old and evil businessman who doesn't believe in Christmas is haunted by three ghosts that show him the joy of Christmas.
