Andrew Lloyd Webber

In 1965, Lloyd Webber was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School and studied history for a term at Magdalen College, Oxford, although he abandoned the course in the winter of 1965 to study at the Royal College of Music and pursue his interest in musical theatre.

In 1965, when Lloyd Webber was a 17-year-old budding musical-theatre composer, he was introduced to the 20-year-old aspiring pop-song writer Tim Rice. Their first collaboration was The Likes of Us, a musical based on the true story of Thomas John Barnardo. They produced a demo tape of that work in 1966, but the project failed to gain a backer.

Although composed in 1965, The Likes of Us was not publicly performed until 2005, when a production was staged at Lloyd Webber's Sydmonton Festival. In 2008, amateur rights were released by the National Operatic and Dramatic Association (NODA) in association with the Really Useful Group. The first amateur performance was by a children's theatre group in Cornwall called "Kidz R Us". Stylistically, The Likes of Us is fashioned after the Broadway musical of the 1940s and 1950s; it opens with a traditional overture comprising a medley of tunes from the show, and the score reflects some of Lloyd Webber's early influences, particularly Richard Rodgers, Frederick Loewe, and Lionel Bart. In this respect, it is markedly different from the composer's later work, which tends to be either predominantly or wholly through-composed, and closer in form to opera than to the Broadway musical.

In 1969, Rice and Lloyd Webber wrote a song for the Eurovision Song Contest called "Try It and See", which was not selected. With rewritten lyrics it became "King Herod's Song" in their third musical, Jesus Christ Superstar (1970). The planned follow-up to Jesus Christ Superstar was a musical comedy based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P. G. Wodehouse. Tim Rice was uncertain about this venture, partly because of his concern that he might not be able to do justice to the novels that he and Lloyd Webber so admired. Rice backed out of the project and Lloyd Webber subsequently wrote the musical Jeeves with Alan Ayckbourn, who provided the book and lyrics. Jeeves failed to make any impact at the box office and closed after a run of only 38 performances in the West End in 1975. Many years later, Lloyd Webber and Ayckbourn revisited this project, producing a thoroughly reworked and more successful version entitled By Jeeves (1996).

There was another accusation of plagiarism regarding Pink Floyd. The band released their sixth studio album, Meddle, in 1971, and the sixth track of the album, "Echoes", has a riff on which Lloyd Webber allegedly based the opening organ riff in "The Phantom of the Opera". The two riffs share very similar notes and the order of the notes played. Lloyd Webber's pipe organ riff from "Phantom of the Opera" plays D, C#, C, B, A#, then ascending A#, B, C, C#, D. Pink Floyd's "Echoes" plays C#, C, B, A#, A, then ascending A, A#, B, C, C#. Pink Floyd bassist and co-lead vocalist Roger Waters pointed this out and said it was "probably actionable", but stated he did not care to take it to court.

Lloyd Webber has been married three times. He married first Sarah Hugill on 24 July 1971 and they divorced on 14 November 1983. Together they had two children, a daughter and a son:

In a 1971 interview with The New York Times, Lloyd Webber said he's an agnostic. He also said he views Jesus as "one of the great figures of history."

In the summer of 1967, Alan Doggett, a family friend of the Lloyd Webbers who had assisted on The Likes of Us and who was the music teacher at the Colet Court school in London, commissioned Lloyd Webber and Rice to write a piece for the school's choir. Doggett requested a "pop cantata" along the lines of Herbert Chappell's The Daniel Jazz (1963) and Michael Hurd's Jonah-Man Jazz (1966), both of which had been published by Novello and were based on the Old Testament. The request for the new piece came with a 100-guinea advance from Novello. This resulted in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph, in which Lloyd Webber and Rice humorously pastiched a number of pop-music styles such as Elvis-style rock'n'roll, Calypso and country music. Joseph began life as a short cantata that gained some recognition on its second staging with a favourable review in The Times. For its subsequent performances, Rice and Lloyd Webber revised the show and added new songs to expand it to a more substantial length. Continued expansion eventually culminated in a 1972 stage musical and then a two-hour-long production being staged in the West End in 1973 on the back of the success of Jesus Christ Superstar.

In 1978, Lloyd Webber embarked on a solo project, the Variations, with his cellist brother Julian based on the 24th Caprice by Paganini, which reached number two in the pop album chart in the United Kingdom. The main theme was used as the theme tune for ITV's long-running South Bank Show throughout its 32-year run. The same year, Lloyd Webber also composed a new theme tune for the long-running documentary series Whicker's World, which was used from 1978 to 1980.

Patti LuPone created the role of Eva on Broadway for which she won a Tony. Evita was a highly successful show that ran for ten years in the West End. It transferred to Broadway in 1979. Rice and Lloyd Webber parted ways soon after Evita, although they have sporadically worked together in the years that followed.

Lloyd Webber was the subject of This Is Your Life in November 1980 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the foyer of Thames Television's Euston Road Studios in London. He would be honoured a second time by the television programme in November 1994 when Michael Aspel surprised him at the West End's Adelphi Theatre.

Lloyd Webber wrote a Requiem Mass dedicated to his father, William, who had died in 1982. It premiered at St. Thomas Church in New York on 24 February 1985. Church music had been a part of the composer's upbringing and the composition was inspired by an article he had read about the plight of Cambodian orphans. Lloyd Webber had on a number of occasions written sacred music for the annual Sydmonton Festival. Lloyd Webber received a Grammy Award in 1986 for Requiem in the category of best classical composition. Pie Jesu from Requiem achieved a high placing on the UK pop charts. Perhaps because of its large orchestration, live performances of the Requiem are rare.

He then married singer Sarah Brightman on 22 March 1984 in Hampshire. He cast Brightman in the lead role in his musical The Phantom of the Opera, among other notable roles. They divorced on 3 January 1990.

In 1986, Prince Edward, the youngest son of Queen Elizabeth II, commissioned a short musical from Lloyd Webber and Rice for his mother's 60th birthday celebration. Cricket (1986), also called Cricket (Hearts and Wickets), reunited Lloyd Webber with Rice to create this short musical for the Queen's birthday, first performed at Windsor Castle. Several of the tunes were later used for Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard.

Lloyd Webber also premiered The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre in the West End in 1986, inspired by the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. He wrote the part of Christine for his then-wife, Sarah Brightman, who played the role in the original London and Broadway productions alongside Michael Crawford as the Phantom. The production was directed by Harold Prince, who had also earlier directed Evita. Charles Hart wrote the lyrics for Phantom with some additional material provided by Richard Stilgoe, with whom Lloyd Webber co-wrote the book of the musical. It became a hit and is still running in both the West End and on Broadway; in January 2006 it overtook Lloyd Webber's Cats as the longest running show on Broadway. On 11 February 2012, Phantom of the Opera played its 10,000th show on Broadway. With over 13,400 London productions it is the second longest-running West End musical.

Due to similarities between Lloyd Webber's "The Music of the Night" and a recurring melody in Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera, La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), in 1987 the Puccini estate filed a lawsuit against Lloyd Webber, accusing him of plagiarism. An agreement was settled out of court and details were not released to the public.

Aspects of Love followed in 1989, a musical based on the story by David Garnett. The lyrics were by Don Black and Charles Hart and the original production was directed by Trevor Nunn. Aspects had a run of four years in London, but closed after less than a year on Broadway. It has since gone on a tour of the UK. It is famous for the song "Love Changes Everything", which was performed by Michael Ball in both the West End and Broadway casts. It stayed in the UK singles chart for 14 weeks, peaking at number 2 and becoming Ball's signature tune.

Thirdly, he married Madeleine Gurdon in Westminster on 9 February 1991. They have three children, two sons and one daughter, all of whom were born in Westminster:

Lloyd Webber and his third wife Madeleine founded the Watership Down Stud in 1992. In 1996, they expanded their equestrian holdings by purchasing Kiltinan Castle Stud near Fethard in County Tipperary, Ireland.

Lloyd Webber was appointed Knight Bachelor in the 1992 Birthday Honours for services to the arts. In the 1997 New Year Honours he was created a life peer as Baron Lloyd-Webber, of Sydmonton in the County of Hampshire. He is properly styled as The Lord Lloyd-Webber; the title is hyphenated, although his surname is not. He sat as a Conservative member of the House of Lords until his retirement from the House on 17 October 2017.

Lloyd Webber had toyed with the idea of writing a musical based on Billy Wilder's critically acclaimed movie, Sunset Boulevard, since the early 1970s when he saw the film, but the project didn't come to fruition until after the completion of Aspects of Love when the composer finally managed to secure the rights from Paramount Pictures, The composer worked with two collaborators, as he had done on Aspects of Love; this time Christopher Hampton and Don Black shared equal credit for the book and lyrics. Sunset Boulevard opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London on 12 July 1993, and ran for 1,529 performances. In spite of the show's popularity and extensive run in London's West End, it lost money due to the sheer expense of the production.

In 1994, Sunset Boulevard became a successful Broadway show, opening with the largest advance in Broadway history, and winning seven Tony Awards that year. Even so, by its closing in 1997, "it had not recouped its reported $13 million investment." From 1995 to 2000, Lloyd Webber wrote the Matters of Taste column in The Daily Telegraph where he reviewed restaurants and hotels, and these were illustrated by Lucinda Rogers.

Lloyd Webber was made a Conservative life peer in 1997; however by the end of 2015, he had voted only 33 times. Politically, Lloyd Webber has supported the UK's Conservative Party, allowing his song "Take That Look Off Your Face" to be used on a party promotional film seen by an estimated 1 million people before the 2005 general election. In August 2014, Lloyd Webber was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.

In 1998, Lloyd Webber released a film version of Cats, which was filmed at the Adelphi Theatre in London. David Mallet directed the film, and Gillian Lynne choreographed it. The cast consisted of performers who had been in the show before, including Ken Page (the original Old Deuteronomy on Broadway), Elaine Paige (original Grizabella in London) and John Mills as Gus: the Theatre Cat.

In 1998, Whistle Down the Wind made its debut, a musical written with lyrics supplied by Jim Steinman. Originally opening in Washington, Lloyd Webber was reportedly not happy with the casting or Harold Prince's production and the show was subsequently revised for a London staging directed by Gale Edwards. The production included the Boyzone number-one hit "No Matter What", which remained at the top of the UK charts for three weeks. His The Beautiful Game opened in London and has never been seen on Broadway. The show had a respectable run at The Cambridge Theatre in London. The show has been re-worked into a new musical, The Boys in the Photograph, which had its world première at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in April 2008.

Having achieved great popular success in musical theatre, Lloyd Webber was referred to by The New York Times in 2001 as "the most commercially successful composer in history". In 2002 he turned producer, bringing the musical Bombay Dreams to London. With music by Indian Music composer A.R. Rahman and lyrics by Don Black, it ran for two years at the Apollo Victoria Theatre. A revised Broadway production at the Broadway Theatre two years later ran for only 284 performances.

Lloyd Webber is an art collector, with a passion for Victorian painting. 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. In 2006, Lloyd Webber planned to sell Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto by Pablo Picasso to benefit the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation. In November 2006, he withdrew the painting from auction after a claim that the previous owner had been forced to sell it under duress in Nazi Germany. An out-of-court settlement was reached, where the foundation retained ownership rights. On 23 June 2010, the painting was sold at auction for £34.7 million to an anonymous telephone bidder.

On 16 September 2004, his production of The Woman in White opened at the Palace Theatre in London. It ran for 19 months and 500 performances. A revised production opened on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre on 17 November 2005. Garnering mixed reviews from critics, due in part to the frequent absences of the show's star Maria Friedman due to breast cancer treatment, it closed only a brief three months later on 19 February 2006.

It was announced on 25 August 2006, on his personal website, that his next project would be The Master and Margarita; however, it was announced in late March 2007 that he had abandoned the project.

In September 2006, Lloyd Webber was named to be a recipient of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors with Zubin Mehta, Dolly Parton, Steven Spielberg, and Smokey Robinson. He was recognised for his outstanding contribution to American performing arts. He attended the ceremony on 3 December 2006; it aired on 26 December 2006. On 11 February 2007, Lloyd Webber was featured as a guest judge on the reality television show Grease: You're the One that I Want!. The contestants all sang "The Phantom of the Opera".

In 2007, Lloyd Webber's cat, Otto, leaped onto his Clavinova piano and "destroyed the entire score for the new 'Phantom' in one fell swoop". The Phantom in question was The Phantom of Manhattan, a planned sequel to The Phantom of the Opera.

On 1 July 2007, Lloyd Webber presented excerpts from his musicals as part of the Concert for Diana held at Wembley Stadium, London, an event organised to celebrate the life of Princess Diana almost 10 years after her death. BBC Radio 2 broadcast a concert of music from the Lloyd Webber musicals on 24 August 2007. Denise Van Outen introduced songs from Whistle Down the Wind, The Beautiful Game, Tell Me on a Sunday, The Woman in White, Evita and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, which Lloyd Webber revived in 2006 at the London Palladium, and the 2002 musical Bombay Dreams.

The Sunday Times Rich List 2006 ranked him the 87th-richest man in Britain with an estimated fortune of £700 million. His wealth increased to £750 million in 2007, but the publication ranked him 101st in 2008. The Sunday Times Rich List of 2019 saw him ranked the richest musician in the UK (overtaking Paul McCartney) with a fortune of £820 million. He lives at Sydmonton Court, Hampshire, and owns much of nearby Watership Down.

In April 2008, Lloyd Webber reprised his role as judge, this time in the BBC musical talent show I'd Do Anything. The show followed a similar format to its Maria and Joseph predecessors, this time involving a search for an actress to play the role of Nancy in a West End production of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, a musical based on the Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. The show also featured a search for three young actors to play and share the title character's role, but the show's main focus was on the search for Nancy. The role was won by Jodie Prenger despite Lloyd Webber's stated preference for one of the other contestants; the winners of the Oliver role were Harry Stott, Gwion Wyn-Jones and Laurence Jeffcoate. Also in April 2008, Lloyd Webber was featured on the U.S. talent show American Idol, acting as a mentor when the 6 finalists had to select one of his songs to perform for the judges that week.

Starlight Express (1984) was a commercial hit, but received negative reviews from the critics. It enjoyed a record run in the West End, but ran for less than two years on Broadway. The show has also seen two tours of the US, as well as an Australian/Japanese production, a three-year UK touring production, which transferred to New Zealand later in 2009. Starlight Express ran for 7,409 performances in London, making it the ninth longest-running West End show. The show also runs full-time in a custom-built theatre in Bochum, Germany, where it has been running since 1988.

Lloyd Webber accepted the challenge of managing the UK's entry for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Moscow. In early 2009 a series, called Eurovision: Your Country Needs You, was broadcast to find a performer for a song that he would compose for the competition. Jade Ewen won the right to represent Britain, winning with "It's My Time", by Lloyd Webber and Diane Warren. At the contest, Lloyd Webber accompanied her on the piano during the performance. The United Kingdom finished 5th in the contest.

On 8 October 2009, Lloyd Webber launched the musical Love Never Dies at a press conference held at Her Majesty's Theatre, where the original Phantom has been running since 1986. Also present were Sierra Boggess, who had been cast as Christine Daaé, and Ramin Karimloo, who portrayed Phantom, a role he had recently played in the West End.

In late 2009, Lloyd Webber had surgery for early-stage prostate cancer, but had to be readmitted to hospital with post-operative infection in November. In January 2010, he declared he was cancer-free. He had his prostate completely removed as a preventative measure.

On 1 March 2011, The Wizard of Oz opened at The Palladium Theatre, starring Danielle Hope as Dorothy and Michael Crawford as the Wizard. In 2012, Lloyd Webber fronted a new ITV primetime show Superstar which gave the UK public the chance to decide who would play the starring role of Jesus in an arena tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. The arena tour started in September 2012 and also starred comedian Tim Minchin as Judas Iscariot, former Spice Girl Melanie C as Mary Magdalene and BBC Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles as King Herod. Tickets for most venues went on sale on 18 May 2012.

A special performance of The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall for the 25th anniversary was broadcast live to cinemas in early October 2011 and later released on DVD and Blu-ray in February 2012. The same was also done with a reworked version of Love Never Dies. Filmed in Melbourne, Australia, it received a limited cinema release in the US and Canada in 2012, to see if it would be viable to bring the show to Broadway.

In 2013, Lloyd Webber reunited with Christopher Hampton and Don Black on Stephen Ward the Musical. In 2014, it was announced that Webber's next project would be a musical adaptation of the 2003 film School of Rock. On 19 January 2015 auditions opened for children aged nine to fifteen in cooperation with the School of Rock music education program, which predated the film by several years.

In October 2015, Lloyd Webber was involved in a contentious House of Lords vote over proposed cuts to tax credits, voting with the Government in favour of the plan. Lloyd Webber was denounced by his critics because he flew in from abroad on his personal plane to vote, when his voting record was scant. In October 2017, Lloyd Webber retired from the House of Lords, stating that his busy schedule was incompatible with the demands of Parliament considering the upcoming crucial Brexit legislation.

In April 2016, the English National Opera staged a revival of Sunset Boulevard at the London Coliseum. The limited run, semi-stage production directed by Lonny Price brought Glenn Close to reprise her star turn as "Norma Desmond", which was her first time performing the role in London; she had originated the role when the show debuted in the US in Los Angeles in December 1993 and then on Broadway in November 1994 (which won her the 1995 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical). The 2016 London revival was so well-received that the production transferred to the Palace Theatre on Broadway in February 2017, making Lloyd Webber the first musical-theatre composer since 1953 to have four musicals running simultaneously on Broadway – a feat that two of his heroes Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had previously achieved.

Lloyd Webber's memoir, Unmasked, was published in March 2018. On 9 September 2018, Lloyd Webber, along with Tim Rice and John Legend each won an Emmy for Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert. With this win, Lloyd Webber, Rice and Legend joined the list of people who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards. Lloyd Webber wrote the song "Beautiful Ghosts" with Taylor Swift for the film adaptation of Cats, produced by Greg Wells and released in December 2019. In an interview in August 2020, Lloyd Webber called the film "ridiculous", and that it deviated from the musical. "The problem with the film was that Tom Hooper decided that he didn’t want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show."

In January 2020, Lloyd Webber announced a new musical, Cinderella, which is planned to open in London in September 2020. A collaboration with Killing Eve scriptwriter Emerald Fennell, Lloyd Webber wrote: "I have long wanted to write my own version of Cinderella but could never find a take on the classic story that really grabbed me. Emerald Fennell has written something truly exciting and original, and the moment I read her outline I knew I’d found my latest collaborator. I’m very pleased to be working with David Zippel, a hugely witty lyricist, once again."

Celebrating Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Birthday the Only Way I Know How

Wait, what? Your desktop calendar did not come with British composer and theater director Andrew Lloyd Webber’s birthday automatically printed into the March 22 box? But it is his 63rd! A milestone! Well don’t worry about it, you can just sign your name on my card. Cats! https://medium.com/media/2fa