Andrew Lloyd Webber

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Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22 March 1948) is a highly successful British composer of musical theatre. He has arguably been the most popular theatre composer of the late 20th century, with multiple showpieces which have run for more than a decade both on Broadway and in the West End. Throughout his career he has produced 16 musicals, two film scores, and a Latin requiem mass. He has also accumulated a number of honors, including seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Oscar, an International Emmy, six Olivier Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. Several of his songs, notably "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" from Evita, "Memory" from Cats, and "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals.

1 Personal history
2 Professional career
3 Shows
4 Trivia
5 External links
6 References
7 See also

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Personal history

Lloyd Webber was born on March 22 1948 in South Kensington. He is the son of composer William Lloyd Webber and piano teacher Jean Johnstone Lloyd Webber, and his younger brother is the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber. He was a Queen's Scholar of Westminster School and went up to Magdalen College, Oxford but did not graduate.

His first wife was Sarah Hugill. They married on 24 July 1972 and had two children, Imogen (born 31 March 1977) and Nicholas (born 2 July 1979). Lloyd Webber and Hugill were divorced in 1983. He then married singer and dancer Sarah Brightman on 22 March 1984. He cast Brightman as the lead in The Phantom of the Opera; however, the marriage did not last, and they divorced in 1990, though remaining friends. He married his present wife, Madeleine Gurdon, on 1 February 1991, and had three more children: Alastair (born 3 May 1992), William (born 24 August 1993), and Isabella (born 30 April 1996).

He was knighted in 1992 and created a life peer in 1997 as Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton, in the County of Hampshire. (His peerage title is hyphenated but his surname is not.) He is ranked the 65th richest Briton in the Sunday Times Rich List 2005 with an estimated wealth of £700m.

Politically, he had been an active supporter and promoter of the Conservative Party, even writing special music for a party political broadcast. However, in recent years, he has distanced himself from the Conservatives.

Lord Lloyd-Webber is an art collector with a passion for Victorian art. An exhibition of works from his collection was presented at the Royal Academy in 2003 under the title Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters—The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection.

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Professional career

Lloyd Webber first gained success at the age of nineteen, when he and Tim Rice were commissioned to write Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for a high school in 1968. The musical was a hit; a slightly rewritten version was soon produced by the Edinburgh Festival. Lloyd Webber and Rice continued to collaborate and later produced Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Evita (1976), both of which were released as albums before being brought to the stage and later to film. The two parted ways soon after, and Lloyd Webber's next large success was 1981's Cats. Lloyd Webber defied convention by writing the score to existing lyrics by a deceased author, rather than having a living collaborator provide the words. The lyrics were based on T.S. Eliot's 1939 Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which Lloyd Webber confessed was a childhood favourite. Interestingly, the lyrics to the show's monster hit "Memory" were mostly the product of director Trevor Nunn's reworking of an unrelated, non-Possum Eliot poem. Cats was the longest running Broadway musical, spanning a reign of more than twenty years. Next, he wrote Starlight Express, which was a commercial hit but panned by the critics. In 1986, he premiered his next musical, The Phantom of the Opera, inspired by the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. Although met with mixed reviews in New York, it became a hit and is still running; in January 2006 it overtook Cats as the longest-running musical on Broadway. His many other musical theatre works include The Likes of Us, Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind, Song and Dance, The Beautiful Game and The Woman in White. While some of his works have had enormous commercial success, his career has not been without failures, especially in the United States. Song and Dance, Starlight Express, and Aspects of Love, all successes in London, did not meet the same reception in New York, and all lost money in short, critically panned runs. In 1995, Sunset Boulevard became a very successful Broadway show, winning seven Tony Awards, although owing to high weekly costs, it too lost a large amount of money. His subsequent shows (Whistle Down the Wind and The Beautiful Game) did not make it to Broadway, and his most recent musical The Woman in White closed after a very short run in New York.

Many of his stage musicals have been taken onto the big screen. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) was directed by Norman Jewison, Evita (1996) was directed by Alan Parker, and most recently The Phantom of the Opera was directed by Joel Schumacher (and co-produced by Lloyd Webber). He was asked to write a piece for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics entitled "Amigos Para Siempre".

He has also composed for film. In 1984, he took a different musical style, composing his Requiem in memory of his father, who had died in 1982.

Lloyd Webber produced Bombay Dreams with Indian composer A. R. Rahman in 2002.

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