Sir Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025

‘People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.’ Quote attributed to Tom Stoppard.

I’ve never seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Or Jumpers, or Arcadia, or any other play by the acclaimed Czech-born playwright who has died, aged 88, at his home in Dorset. On the other hand, I have seen several films for which he co-wrote the screenplay, among them Brazil, Empire of the Sun, Shakespeare In Love (still one of my favourite films), and Enigma.

I was aware too of Stoppard’s cultural impact, and the broad details of a life that began in Czechoslovakia in 1938 before he arrived in Britain, via Singapore, Australia and India, in 1946.

His rock star good looks, his marriages, and his long affair with actress Felicity Kendall all gilded his reputation, but the reason I’m writing about him here is because he was an inveterate smoker, and a few years ago I invited him to attend the annual Forest lunch at Boisdale.

It was a long shot for several reasons, not least his advanced age (he was 85 at the time) which I rather overlooked because, in my mind’s eye, all I could see were the many dashing images of him, cigarette in hand, when he was younger. Also, despite his well documented habit, I don’t recall him ever speaking out against anti-smoking legislation in the manner of David Hockney, for example, so I knew the chances of him coming were very small.

I sent an invitation and a covering letter via his agent but wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get a reply because agents tend to act as gatekeepers and many are extremely protective of their clients, which is understandable, so there’s every chance he never saw it.

Also, when I wrote my letter, I was unaware that Sir Tom (he was knighted in 1997) had cancer. I found out only last night when I was reading about his death. One or two articles have mentioned it but most haven’t, so perhaps it wasn’t widely known, but it was a faux pas on my part.

Nevertheless, 88 is a good innings and, as Stoppard himself is reported to have said, ‘We've all got to die of something’.

Ironically, Sir Tom’s second wife, Miriam Stoppard, to whom he was married from 1972 to 1992, is a quit smoking evangelist who frequently used her column in the Daily Mirror to demand more anti-smoking measures.

In January 2020 she called for a ban on smoking in outdoor spaces, arguing that it would help denormalise smoking and make quitting more likely. I’ve often wondered whether her two-decade marriage to an unrepentant chain smoker is partly responsible for her antipathy to the habit!

Update: Patrick Marber, who directed two of Stoppard’s later plays, has written a lovely article for the Guardian. I don’t want to bang on about smoking because smoking didn’t define Stoppard – it was just something he did – but I did enjoy these passages:

I soon realised that to work closely with Tom, I should resume smoking. He smoked from dawn to bedtime and it seemed to me bad manners not to join in.

Then, ‘about a year ago’, Marber visited Stoppard at his London flat.

He’d stopped smoking – a very worrying sign. Said he just didn’t feel like it. He said he occasionally had the odd puff but couldn’t finish them. He was thin. Very thin. But all there. In his gown and slippers. Something Chekhovian about him. Anyway. Sabrina [Stoppard’s wife] had gone out leaving us to ourselves. He told me it was fine to smoke, would welcome the old reek of it, so I did. He eyed my packet and asked if he could have one. I hesitated. I really didn’t want to be responsible for killing the greatest living playwright. He insisted. We smoked four fags each, back to back. He was chuckling away. Guilty schoolboy.

See: ‘There was rage and pain and iron in him’: Patrick Marber on the great hits – and fond smokes – he had with Tom Stoppard (Guardian)

Quote Unqote

While most playwrights reacted to Thatcherism with horror and disapproval, Stoppard did not. He described Mrs Thatcher approvingly as ‘a subversive influence’, and openly referred to the period before her, the time of ‘Sunny Jim’ Callaghan and three-day weeks, as ‘nauseating’. (Alexander Larman, The Critic, February 15, 2020)

His hearing has mostly absented itself but his thatch of grey hair is very present; his voice retains its richness with a hint of speech impediment around the Rs. And after cheating the Grim Reaper so many times as a boy, he's outwitted him as an adult too; he remains an enthusiastic smoker. (Time, October 2, 2022)

The author Robert Harris, a friend of Stoppard, said: "He lived one of the most enviable lives I can think of. He was immensely talented, he was a very happy man, very witty and he enjoyed life. He came to lunch here in the summer and he was still smoking and indeed he was making notes in the summer for writing." (The Times, November 29, 2025)

Stoppard was widely appreciated for his wit. When applying to be a reporter as a 25-year-old, he was quizzed about a line on his CV saying he was interested in politics. Asked by the interviewer who the home secretary was, Stoppard replied: "I said I was interested, not obsessed." (The Times, November 29, 2025)

As I went round his world, interviewing his friends, theatre colleagues and fellow writers, I couldn’t find anyone with a bad word to say about him. He really was, and is, universally loved and admired. (Biographer Hermione Lee, Observer, November 30, 2025)

A tall and strikingly handsome man, with a long, bloodhound face, a thick tangle of hair and a casually assembled wardrobe of expensive suits, coats and very long scarves, Stoppard cut an exotic, dandyish figure, a valiant and incorrigible smoker who moved easily in the highest social and academic circles … Politically, Stoppard was a member of the libertarian right, a conservative with a small “c”. He was loth to find fault with a Britain where free speech and human rights were largely respected because he knew at first hand of countries, and regimes, where such privileges were rare … (The Guardian, November 30, 2025)

Additional reading: Tom Stoppard was the epitome of cool. British theatre will be poorer without him (Telegraph)

Below: Sir Tom Stoppard at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival in 2010. Photo: Alamy