By Vanessa Hunt
From Utah Shakespeare Festival
Tom Stoppard
Academy Award winner Tomas Straussler, later know as Tom Stoppard, was born on July 3, 1937 in Czechoslovakia. In 1939, as the Nazis invaded his hometown, Stoppard and his family fled to Singapore where his father, a doctor, was reposted thanks to a town patron whose company worked to repost Jewish employees. Following the move to Singapore, Stoppard’s father sent him, along with Stoppard’s mother and brother, to Australia. Staying in Singapore to help the British defense, his father became a prisoner of war and reportedly drowned on a ship after it was bombed by Japanese forces.
Forced once again to flee, young Tomas and his family arrived in India where he attended an American multiracial school, and it was there that his name was changed from Tomas to Tom. Four years later, his mother married a British army major named Kenneth Stoppard, and Tom took on his stepfather’s last name. After the war ended, the family moved to England where he attended Dolphin School and finalized his education at Pocklington School. Stoppard never received a formal university education, which later became one of his greatest regrets.
At age seventeen, Stoppard began a job as a journalist at Western Daily Press. He worked there for four years until he was offered a job at the Bristol Evening World where he was a featured writer, humor columnist, and secondary drama critic. It was during this time that he was fully introduced to the world of theatre.
Starting his writing career with writing short plays for radio, Stoppard then delved into the world of playwrighting for the theatre in 1960 when he finished his first play, A Walk on the Water. It was televised in London, later retitled Enter a Free Man, and was produced onstage in 1968. His first widely recognized play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, was written in 1964. However, it began as a one-act play titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear. In 1967, this play was met with rave reviews as it played in Britain’s National Theatre circuit and became internationally known. As he continued to write, his work explored themes in surrealism and existentialism. Eventually, he expanded his work to include screenplays.
Stoppard’s credits span decades with works for the theatre such as Albert’s Bridge, Jumpers, Travesties, 15-Minute Hamlet, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Hard Problem, and many others His screenwriting credits include Brazil, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Anna Karenina, and Tulip Fever. Perhaps his most famous screenplay, though, is the Academy Award-winning movie Shakespeare in Love, which he worked on with screenwriter Marc Norman.
Marc Norman
Marc Norman was born on February 10, 1941 in Los Angeles, California. He received a master’s degree in English from the University of California Berkeley, and after graduation he decided to pursue a career in the entertainment field. He applied for jobs with different production companies before finally landing a job with Universal in the executive training program. This was a thankless job as he spent eight hours a day delivering mail around the studio. Upon hearing that television producer Roy Huggins was starting a new series, Norman approached him about working as a production assistant. While Huggins turning him down for the job, he told Norman that he needed story ideas. Norman took the opportunity, and Huggins eventually bought one of the ideas that Norman presented. Universal then promoted Norman to the position of casting director, although he was unhappy in this position as well. He worked with the studio for years until his desire to write became too great. For five years, he wrote rewrites for television scripts and then moved on to writing features.
Finally, Norman had a breakthrough with his writing as he developed the idea of Shakespeare starting a theatre company. This is where Shakespeare in Love found its beginnings. It took nine months of research and three months of actual writing before the script was finished. In 1991, Universal purchased the script. Edward Zwick was set to direct the film, but he didn’t like what Norman had written and brought on famed writer Tom Stoppard to do a rewrite and improve upon Norman’s script. Just weeks before production was to begin in 1992, Julia Roberts, who was set to star in the film, left the project because a suitable Shakespearean-level actor could not be found for the lead. After Roberts left, the project was put on hold. In 1997, Universal sold the
