Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer · Public domain

A playwright who fled Czechoslovakia as a Jewish child ahead of the Nazi occupation, was educated in India and England, and became one of the most performed dramatists of his generation — critics compared him to Shakespeare and Shaw. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, and The Coast of Utopia established him on stage, while his screenplays for Shakespeare in Love and Brazil carried the same wit into film. Late in life he wrote Leopoldstadt, confronting the Jewish history he had spent decades not writing about directly. He was knighted in 1997.