Andrew Lloyd Webber

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Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born March 22, 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, 2 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 External links
5 References

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Personal history

Lloyd Webber was born on March 22, 1948 in South Kensington, England. He is the son of composer William Lloyd Webber and piano teacher Jean Johnstone Lloyd Webber and brother of cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, born in 1951. 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 July 24, 1972 and had two children, Imogen (born March 31, 1977) and Nicholas (born July 2, 1979). Lloyd Webber and Hugill were divorced in 1983. He then married singer and dancer Sarah Brightman on March 22, 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 February 1, 1991, and had three more children: Alastair (born May 3, 1992), William (born August 24, 1993), and Isabella (born April 30, 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 has been an active supporter and promoter of the Conservative Party.

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Professional career

Andrew 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. 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, rather than the other way around. 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. 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. 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 one of the biggest financial disasters in Broadway history, and his subsequent works have not yet made it to 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.