It is common nowadays for playwrights to go back and forth between stage and screen assignments, but Tom Stoppard, whose death at 88 was announced on Saturday, was an early adopter of the practice, with TV credits going back to the early 1960s.
Some entries in his impressively lengthy collection of screenplays were originals, but he was especially in demand both as a script doctor (usually uncredited) and as a go-to scribe for literary adaptations. In that latter capacity, he was able to tackle novels by writers as wildly different as John le Carré, Leo Tolstoy, E.L. Doctorow, Vladimir Nabokov, J.G. Ballard and Ford Madox Ford.
Below you will find a selection of films with Stoppard screenplays that are available on major American streaming platforms. (Those curious about his work on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Despair,” a Nabokov adaptation, will have to poke around YouTube.)
1975
‘The Romantic Englishwoman’
Stoppard was enthralled with the world of letters, and in this Joseph Losey film Michael Caine plays one of the many writers to pop up in the Stoppard oeuvre. Caine’s character is married to a woman played by the mighty Glenda Jackson, with the sexily enigmatic Helmut Berger in the middle — a lineup that, like the film, could not be more mid-1970s. The source material is a novel by Thomas Wiseman, who co-wrote the screenplay, but the Stoppardian touches feel obvious as life constantly bleeds into fiction, and vice versa, to the point where it becomes difficult to tell what’s inspiring what.
Stream it on Tubi.
A trifecta of intelligent intelligence
1979
Stoppard had a lifelong fascination with espionage, and amateurs of that genre should check out his work in three movies based on novels by best-selling masters. First is his Graham Greene adaptation “The Human Factor,” a coldly detached drama about the uncovering of a mole inside the British secret service. The wreckage caused in this movie is less cloak-and-dagger than psychological torment.
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
1990
The Cold War is depicted in a flashier way in “The Russia House,” based on a John le Carré book. Sean Connery plays a publisher (there’s that literary connection again) and Michelle Pfeiffer dons a Russian accent as a mysterious woman who sends him an even more mysterious manuscript.
Stream it on Tubi.
2002
The best of this trilogy of sorts is the Robert Harris adaptation “Enigma,” a potboiler involving the British code breakers stationed at Bletchley Park during World War II — a great setting for a writer as enamored with the connection between language and ideas as Stoppard.
Rent or buy it on Fandango at Home.
1985
‘Brazil’
Terry Gilliam’s dystopian movie is the funniest tragedy of the past half-century, or the saddest comedy — Janet Maslin described it as “a jaunty, wittily observed vision of an extremely bleak future” in her review for The New York Times. What is certain is that “Brazil” is an incredibly influential film about the pressure to conform and madness as an escape. Stoppard (who wrote the “Brazil” screenplay with Gilliam and Charles McKeown) and his family had left their native Czechoslovakia in 1939, but he always had a strong connection with his homeland — which may have fed the themes of doublespeak, sloganeering, surveillance and authoritarian power found in “Brazil.”
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
1987
‘Empire of the Sun’
Stoppard adapted a semi-autobiographical novel by the British writer J.G. Ballard for what would turn out to be one of Steven Spielberg’s best films of the 1980s. The story centers on a young British boy (Christian Bale, in his first major role) who spends most of World War II in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai where he must fend for himself. This is likely to have been an evocative setting for Stoppard, who had spent the early 1940s in Singapore with his family, before being evacuated to India.
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
1990
‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’
Stoppard himself directed this screen adaptation of his breakthrough play, from 1966. A comic “Hamlet” spinoff, the story moves the title characters, played here by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, from the periphery of the story to its center. Verbose, filled with references and wordplay, it is ur-Stoppard. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival; a runner-up was Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” so not too shabby for Stoppard’s lone directorial effort.
Stream it on Tubi.
1998
‘Shakespeare in Love’
Stoppard’s most famous screenplay remains that of the historical romantic comedy “Shakespeare in Love,” for which he and the writer Marc Norman shared an Academy Award in 1999. The movie mixed life, repartee and art in a riff on Shakespeare, this one imagining a story grafting itself onto “Romeo & Juliet.”
“As with ‘Rosencrantz,’ the movie is both Stoppardian and Shakespearean, which is to say it is an antic original but also respectful of its source,” Mel Gussow wrote in The Times. He also pointed out that even though Stoppard and Norman shared the credit, “the dialogue has the linguistic limberness of Mr. Stoppard at his wittiest.”
Stream it on Paramount+.
2012
‘Parade’s End’
Boiling down Ford Madox Ford’s modernist tetralogy into a mini-series was no small task, but Stoppard was up for it. The project gave Benedict Cumberbatch one of his finest roles as a government statistician who fights in the trenches of the Great War and is torn between two women. The mood is certainly not light, but “Mr. Stoppard sifts delicious bits of dialogue from the novel’s long, stream-of-consciousness monologues,” Alessandra Stanley wrote in The Times, “and he is especially good at drawing out the light comedy beneath all the ill will and betrayal.”
Stream it on HBO.
2012
‘Anna Karenina’
Stoppard returned to Russia over and over again in his work, most notably in his trilogy “The Coast of Utopia.” So it wasn’t a surprise to see him take on one of that country’s literary summits, “Anna Karenina.” According to A.O. Scott’s review in The Times, Stoppard and the director Joe Wright’s take on the Tolstoy masterpiece “is risky and ambitious enough to count as an act of artistic hubris, and confident enough to triumph on its own slightly — wonderfully — crazy terms.” Set in a theater, the film was deliberately stagy, with Stoppard focusing on one aspect of the story. “The word ‘love’ is central to the book, and to our movie,” he said. “I decided not to work on including those parts of the novel that might be about something else.”
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
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