At the age of eleven Tom Stoppard met Hamlet - on the screen in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film. Six years later, at the beginning of his career as a journalist, Stoppard formalized his relationship with the cinema. The presence of a movie theatre next to one of the Bristol newspapers where he worked - and where he and other reporters spent numerous hours on “assignment” - was one source; another was his appointment as film critic on the Bristol Evening World, soon to be supplemented by work as a film columnist for the Western Daily Press. Such exposure enhanced his sense of the visual as well as his fascination with the creative possibilities of action, point of view, and dramatic dialogue. Mixed with his admiration for movie culture - he interviewed such stars as Diana Dors and Albert Finney - it is no surprise that as his career developed, he would have his own work optioned by the studios and be asked to adapt the work of writers he admired for the screen. The job paid well and he was able to graft his talent for dialogue on to the plots of others.

Adaptations, rather than original screenplays, became Stoppard’s métier; through adaptation, he developed a lucrative secondary talent as a “script doctor.” From Nabokov’s Despair to Graham Greene’s The Human Factor and John le Carré’s The Russia House (and most recently, Enigma, a script based on the Robert Harris novel dealing with espionage and the Bletchley Park decoding project during World War Two), Stoppard showed himself to work best in film with the work of others. While finding the money terrific, he welcomed the work as a break from searching for original play ideas.