Born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, his family moved to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis. When the Japanese overran the island state during the war, Doctor Straussler sent his family to India but stayed behind himself and died in a prison camp.
Tom's mother later married a British army officer, Kenneth Stoppard. The family came to England in 1946.
Tom Stoppard left school at seventeen and began his writing career as a journalist. His first full-length play, A Walk On the Water (produced in 1968 as Enter a Free Man and described by the playwright as a composite of several…
