LONDON: British playwright Tom Stoppard, who won an Oscar for the screenplay of the 1998 movie Shakespeare In Love, died at the age of 88 on Saturday.

Stoppard, who first made his name with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, an absurdist tragicomedy about two minor characters from Shakespeare`s Hamlet, developed a distinctive style combining serious ideas with comedy.

`We are deeply saddened to announce that our beloved client and friend, Tom Stoppard, has died peacefully at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family,` his family said.

`What`s it about?` was a frequent response from bemused theatre-goers toRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard`s first stage triumph.

Tired of being asked, Stoppard is said to have replied to a woman outside a theatre on Broadway: `It`s about to make me very rich.` He later questioned whether he had said `very`, Hermione Lee writes in Stoppard`s authorised biography, but he had undoubtedly managed to transform his previously precarious Knances.

Brilliant word play For every puzzled spectator, there were many more ecstatic fans and critics, dazzled by the wit, brilliant word play and sheer daring of a young playwright who had turned Shakespeare inside out andplaced the spotlight, not on the eponymous Hamlet, but on two minor characters from the same play.

First performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the following year, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead made Stoppard, at the age of 29, the youngest playwright to be staged in London.

Stoppard`s career flourished for decades more, embracing stage, screen and radio, and demonstrating his thirst to tackle any subject from mathematics to Dadaist art to landscape gardening. His final play, Leopoldstadt, first performed in 2020, follows the story of a Jewish family in Vienna inspired by his own history.

Stoppard`s many other successesincluded The Real Inspector Hound, which parodied stage whodunnits and sent up theatre critics, Jumpers, a 1.5 million word epic that delighted and confused its public, and Night and Day, a satire on the British media.

His densely pacl(ed, intricately constructed plays were based on extensive research. Arcadia, in 1993, considered by many critics to be his masterpiece, blended chaos theory, Isaac Newton and the poet Lord Byron`s love life.

The word Stoppardian, first recorded in 1978, meanwhile entered the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to the use of verbal gymnastics while addressing philosophical concepts.The honours he won at home and abroad included an Oscar for co-authoring the screenplay of the 1998 hit film Shakespeare in Love, and a record five Tony awards for Best Play. In 1997, he was knighted for his contributions to theatre.

Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on July3,1937inwhatwasthenCzechoslovalcia, the son of Eugen Straussler, a doctor, and Marta, who had trained as a nurse.

The Jewish family fled the Nazis and moved to Singapore when he was an infant.

Singapore in turn became unsafe. With his mother and elder brother Peter, he escaped to India. His father stayed behind and died while fleeing after Singapore fell to the Japanese.-Reuters