Wow. It’s fairly well known that the playwright Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia, and that his new name came when his mother remarried when Tom was still young. But I had no idea his stepfather had later tried to take his name back — in 1996. After Stoppard had already been famous for, oh, thirty years.

An ill-tempered martinet bristling with bigotry, [stepfather Major Kenneth] Stoppard lost no time, when the family settled in England, in anglicising his stepsons’ first names and changing their surname to his. Since loathing of “artiness” figured high among his prejudices, it was a move his younger stepson’s flamboyant theatrical career subsequently gave him ample cause to regret. Days after his wife died in 1996, he wrote to Tom Stoppard demanding that his surname be returned (with some restraint, Stoppard replied that reassuming the name of Straussler after half a century was “not practical”).

17 March 2008

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