TOM STOPPARD

The celebrated playwright gets the Lee treatment.

Stoppard (b. 1937) asked award-winning literary biographer Lee to write his biography, giving her “access to a wealth of materials and permission to quote from them.” In this thorough, sympathetic, and eminently readable text, the author tracks his early years in Czechoslovakia through his time in Singapore, India, and England, where he met his stepfather, Maj. Kenneth Stoppard. Interestingly Lee notes that Stoppard, who dropped out of college, didn’t show much interest in the theater until he was a reporter for a Bristol newspaper. The city’s vibrant arts scene motivated an “anxious, eager, ambitious, shy and unworldly” young man who became friends with Peter O’Toole. A job with another paper had him writing film and play reviews, covering “everything that came out, from new European cinema to Hollywood romances, from Westerns to film noir, from musicals to disaster movies.” As she has done in her previous top-notch books, Lee carefully unwinds autobiographical links between her subject’s life and works. Despite his newspaper work, Stoppard knew that plays were “his business” and “theatre was where he might find rapid success.” His first play, A Walk on the Water, was produced in 1963, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which began as a one-act play, debuted in 1966. Though the “first reviews” were “terrible,” most were “ecstatic,” making Stoppard “all at once successful and famous.” As Lee masterfully explores both her subject’s life and work, she portrays a uniquely talented writer fully in tune with a wide variety of influences. She pays close attention to his screenplays, as well, including Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, Shakespeare in Love (“one of his best-loved pieces of work”), and a TV adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. He enjoyed doing films but noted that they weren’t a “continuation of one’s life as a writer” but rather “a detour.” Ultimately, this expansive portrait of a significant 20th-century artist is a biographical masterpiece. Stoppard chose his biographer well.

Authoritative and exhaustive—another jewel in Lee’s literary crown.