Stoppard was born Tom Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), on July 3, 1937. When he was two years old, his family fled from the Nazis to Singapore where his father, a company physician, was killed at the start of World War II. Stoppard and his mother lived in India for the duration of the war and moved to England in 1946. There she wed Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British Army. Tom assumed his stepfather's surname. His earliest writing was as a newspaper journalist after he quit school at the age of seventeen. He began writing his first plays in the 1960s with A Walk on the Water and won his first critical acclaim with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1965. Since then he has written many television scripts, radio plays, short stories, film scripts (including Brazil, The Russia House, Billy Bathgate, Empire of the Sun, and Shakespeare in Love) and over forty plays including Arcadia, The Invention of Love, Jumpers, Rock 'n' Roll, The Coast of Utopia, and The Real Inspector Hound.