Liz Robertson

Liz Robertson, born on 4 May 1954 in Ilford, Essex, England, is an actress, singer, and the widow of playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner. She began formal training at the Finch Stage School at age three, and by sixteen had secured her first professional engagement as a cabaret dancer at London's Savoy Hotel. She subsequently joined a dance group called The Go-Jo's, and within a year had become the lead singer and dancer on BBC Two's The Young Generation.

Robertson's West End career encompassed a wide range of productions, including A Little Night Music, directed by Hal Prince, and the revue Side By Side By Sondheim, which she later took to Toronto alongside Georgia Brown. Additional London theatre credits include I Love My Wife, My Fair Lady, Song and Dance, Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood, The Music Man, and The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre. She is particularly associated with the role of Madame Giry, having played it in the original cast of Love Never Dies at the Adelphi Theatre and in The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall. She also starred as Velma Von Tussle in Hairspray at the Shaftesbury Theatre, appeared as Miss Smythe/Miss Andrew in the second London revival of Mary Poppins at the Prince Edward Theatre — a production that ran from 7 August 2021 until 8 January 2023 — and played the Wicked Queen in Snow White at the Bristol Hippodrome beginning 11 December 2009, returning to the same venue as the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella during the Christmas 2013 run.

Robertson made her Broadway debut in 1983 in Dance a Little Closer, a musical adaptation of Idiot's Delight with music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by her husband, Alan Jay Lerner, which closed on its opening night. She returned to Broadway in 1986 with the revue Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood, which ran for 24 performances. She also starred in an extensive US tour of The King and I and performed the production at the Kennedy Center before President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy.

Robertson married Alan Jay Lerner in August 1981 in Billingshurst, England. The two met when Lerner directed her in a revival of My Fair Lady. Robertson presented a one-woman show, Just Liz, at the Chichester Festival Theatre and the Duke of York's Theatre in London; the show was subsequently taped and broadcast by Television South. She is also part of the original cast of the touring play Seven Deadly Sins Four Deadly Sinners. In addition to her performing career, Robertson has served as a trustee of The Theatrical Guild, a charity supporting backstage and front-of-house theatre workers, and held the position of chairperson from 2005 to 2009.