Andrew Lloyd Webber

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber, is an English composer, lyricist, and book writer born on 22 March 1948 at Westminster Hospital in London. One of the most prominent figures in musical theatre, he has composed 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass, with several productions running for more than a decade simultaneously in the West End and on Broadway. His Broadway credits include Cats, Aspects of Love, Evita, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Jesus Christ Superstar, among other works.

Lloyd Webber was the elder son of William Lloyd Webber, a composer and organist, and Jean Hermione Johnstone, a violinist and pianist. His younger brother, Julian Lloyd Webber, is a solo cellist. Music occupied his life from an exceptionally early age: he began playing piano and violin at three, took up the French horn shortly after, and was composing his own music by six, completing a suite of six pieces at nine. His aunt Viola, an actress, introduced him to the theatre by taking him to her shows and through the stage door. He was enrolled as a part-time student at the Eric Gilder School of Music in 1963 and attended Westminster School as a Queen's Scholar from 1960 to 1965. He briefly studied history at Magdalen College, Oxford, before leaving in the winter of 1965 to attend the Royal College of Music in London.

In 1965, at seventeen, Lloyd Webber was introduced to Tim Rice, then twenty, and the two began a creative partnership. Their first collaboration, The Likes of Us, was a musical based on the life of Thomas John Barnardo, for which they produced a demo tape in 1966, though the project did not secure a backer. Though composed in 1965, the work was not publicly performed until 2005 at Lloyd Webber's Sydmonton Festival. In the summer of 1967, a family friend and music teacher named Alan Doggett commissioned Lloyd Webber and Rice to write a piece for the choir at Colet Court school in London, offering a 100-guinea advance from publisher Novello. The result was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph that drew on a range of pop-music styles including Elvis-style rock and roll, calypso, and country music. The piece began as a short cantata, was revised and expanded over subsequent performances, and eventually became a full stage musical in 1972, with a two-hour West End production following in 1973.

In 1969, Rice and Lloyd Webber wrote a song called "Try It and See" for the Eurovision Song Contest; it was not selected, but with revised lyrics it became "King Herod's Song" in their next collaboration, Jesus Christ Superstar. That musical debuted on Broadway in 1971 and had grossed more than $237 million worldwide by 1980. Its London run, which lasted from 1972 to 1980, held the record for longest-running West End musical until Cats surpassed it in 1989. Following Jesus Christ Superstar, Lloyd Webber collaborated with playwright Alan Ayckbourn on Jeeves, a musical based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P. G. Wodehouse, after Rice declined to participate in the project. Jeeves closed after 38 performances in the West End in 1975.

Several songs from Lloyd Webber's musicals have achieved wide recognition beyond their original productions. These include "Memory" from Cats, "The Music of the Night" and "All I Ask of You" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" from Evita, and "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In 2001, The New York Times described him as "the most commercially successful composer in history," and in 2008 The Daily Telegraph ranked him fifth on its list of the most powerful people in British culture, an occasion on which lyricist Don Black stated that Lloyd Webber "more or less single-handedly reinvented the musical."

His awards are extensive. On Broadway, he received the Tony Award for Best Musical in both 1988 and 1995, as well as the Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1995. Across his career he has accumulated seven Tony Awards in total, along with seven Laurence Olivier Awards, three Grammy Awards, the Grammy Legend Award, an Academy Award, 14 Ivor Novello Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Brit Award, and two Classic Brit Awards — one for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 2008 and one for Musical Theatre and Education in 2018. He received a knighthood in 1992, followed by a life peerage for services to the arts. In 2018, when Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Live), Lloyd Webber became the thirteenth person to have won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. He also holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors. He was honored at the Kennedy Center in 2006.

Beyond composing, Lloyd Webber heads LW Entertainment, formerly known as The Really Useful Group, which is one of the largest theatre operators in London and licenses productions of his musicals to producers across the United Kingdom. He serves as president of the Arts Educational Schools in Chiswick, west London. In 1992 he established the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, which supports the arts, culture, and heritage of the United Kingdom. He is also involved with charitable organizations including the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Nordoff Robbins, Prostate Cancer UK, and War Child.