PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF ALAN THORNHILL (LOTS 338-353)
ALAN THORNHILL (1921-2020)
Tom Stoppard
numbered 220 in silver pen (underneath)
patinated terracotta
35 cm (13 3/4 in) high

Tom Stoppard sat for this bust at his home in Iver, Buckinghamshire in 1973, a year after his play Jumpers had won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play and London Theatre Critics Award for Best New Play.

Thornhill was inspired by the immediacy of live theatre and was a great fan of Stoppard's work. He recalled of the present bust: 'Dissatisfied with the first day's attempt I did another in one day and felt I had made a breakthrough'.

Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937. When the Nazis invaded the country in 1939, his parents fled with their two sons to Singapore where his father was killed. His mother then took the chidren to India where she remarried, to a British army Major Kenneth Stoppard. After the War the family settled in the north of England, when Stoppard took his step-father's name. After leaving Pocklington school at 17 he worked first as a journalist, and then as a theatre critic in Bristol whilst also developing his script writing. His first major break through as a playwright was with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in the summer of 1966, and then in April 1967 by the National Theatre at the Old Vic. The NT production made Stoppard an overnight sensation. Many acclaimed plays have followed, amongst them The Real Inspector Hound (1968), Travesties (1975) and Arcadia (1993). His most recent play is Leopoldstadt (2020).

A bronze cast of the present work is in the Harry Ransom Center (in Austin, Texas), a humanities research centre, archive, library and museum at the University of Texas which has an extensive holding of Stoppard's papers.