Bruce Weber, with unhappy news in The New York Times (gift link):

Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright who entwined erudition with imagination, verbal pyrotechnics with arch cleverness, and philosophical probing with heartache and lust in stage works that won accolades and awards on both sides of Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw, has died at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88. […]

Few writers for the stage — or the page, for that matter — have exhibited the rhetorical dazzle of Mr. Stoppard, or been as dauntless in plumbing the depths of intellect for conflict and drama. Beginning in 1966 with his witty twist on “Hamlet” — “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” — he soon earned a reputation as the most cerebral of contemporary English-language playwrights, venturing into vast fields of scholarly inquiry — theology, political theory, the relationship of mind and body, the nature of creativity, the purpose of art — and spreading his work across the centuries and continents.

Tom Stoppard has been an essential part of my theatrical and movie-going upbringing for nigh on forty years. I first encountered his work in the late 1980s, shortly after I joined the New York Parks’ Shakespeare Company to study acting. We were learning Hamlet and our directors shared Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a way of fleshing out our understanding of the story, an alternate view into the play that highlighted the absurdities of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

I loved it. It tickled my brain in exactly the right way.

Unsurprisingly, I was equally smitten by Shakespeare in Love, the screenplay for which Stoppard won an Oscar and Golden Globe. It remains one of my favorite movies (and only in small part due to Gwyneth Paltrow).

I first saw Arcadia in 2004, and again in 2013. In between, I saw The Real Thing, Travesties, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Indian Ink: Stoppard was in regular rotation at San Francisco’s A.C.T., for which I’m terribly grateful.

Until today, I wasn’t aware that he was an often-uncredited script doctor, punching up movies, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. I shouldn’t be surprised: Last Crusade is my favorite of that trilogy, and RotS is considered the best of the Star Wars prequel entries.

I loved Stoppard’s faculty with language, his playfulness, his ability to go from farcical to philosophical in a single phrase. His “exit is an entrance somewhere else.” Like other timeless, surname-is-sufficient writers—Shakespeare, Shaw, Beckett—Stoppard leaves us with his breathtakingly exquisite words.

“Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.”