Tom Stoppard

One of his four sons is the actor Ed Stoppard.

His partner is the English actress Felicity Kendal, who came to fame in The Good Life and was one of the two gardener-detectives in the TV serial Rosemary and Thyme.

He speaks Czech and translated some of Vaclav Havel's plays into English.

The first working title of Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear. First performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, 1966, a production ran for a year on Broadway from October 1967 and was nominated for eight Tony Awards. It won four of them, including Best Play.

Stoppard's real father, Eugene Straussler, was in Singapore when it was captured by the Japanese in 1941 and died in a Japanese internment camp for enemy aliens.

He co-wrote the screenplays for the movies Brazil (1985) and Shakespeare in Love (1998).

Stoppard worked as the drama critic of London's Scene magazine from 1962 to 1963. Some of his work for Scene appeared under the name of 'William Boot', the fictional wildlife column writer in Evelyn Waugh's book Scoop (1938) who accidentally became a war correspondent.

The annual Tom Stoppard Prize was established in Stockholm in 1983, and is awarded to authors of Czech origin.

Stoppard's first major play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) is a comedy which centres on two minor characters from Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet.

In his early years as a writer, Tom Stoppard wrote mostly for BBC radio.

He has published just one novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966).

He has received seven Evening Standard Awards: Most Promising Playwright (1967), Best Play, for 'Jumpers' (1972), Best Comedy, for 'Travesties' (1974), Best Play, for 'Night and Day' (1978), Best Play, for 'The Real Thing' (1982), Best Play, for 'Arcadia' (1993), Best Play, for 'The Invention of Love' (1997).

He left school at the age of seventeen to take a job as a journalist on the Bristol newspaper Western Daily Press.