Lloyd Webber, Andrew, Lord Lloyd Webber of Sydmonton

Lloyd Webber, Andrew, Lord Lloyd Webber of Sydmonton (1948- ), British composer, whose popular stage musicals include Jesus Christ Superstar (1971; in collaboration with Tim Rice), Cats (1981), and Phantom of the Opera (1986).

He was born in London and educated at Oxford University and at the Royal College of Music. The son of the director of the London College of Music, Lloyd Webber began his musical training as a child. He published his first composition at the age of nine. In 1967, he was still a student when, with friend Tim Rice, he wrote Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for a school performance. The musical was later produced professionally at the Edinburgh Festival, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 1972. Lloyd Webber and Rice next collaborated on Jesus Christ Superstar. It was issued as a record album in 1970 and sold more than 3 million copies before the show opened in the United States on Broadway the following year. The musical was nominated for five Tony Awards, and Lloyd Webber, as composer, won the Drama Desk Award (1973). It became the longest-running musical in the history of British theatre, running for 3,358 performances, and was produced throughout the world. The next Lloyd Webber-Rice collaboration was Evita (1976), based on the life of Eva Perón. It was again successful in London, where it opened in 1978 and made a star of Elaine Paige, and New York (1979), where it won seven Tony Awards and a Grammy.

Lloyd Webber and Rice parted ways in the early 1980s and Lloyd Webber’s first solo production Cats was based on the collection of comic verses by T.S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats; opening in London in 1981 and in New York in 1982, it closed in New York in 2000 and in London on its 21st anniversary in May 2002. It, in turn, became the longest-running musical in history. Through its success, Lloyd Webber became the first person to have three shows running simultaneously both in the West End and on Broadway. Next came Starlight Express, unusually a non-narrative show that relied largely on the spectacle of its elaborate, built-in sets and the roller-skating cast. It opened in the West End in 1984, and ran for 7,406 performances, becoming the longest-running musical in history after Cats. The Phantom of the Opera opened in London in 1986 and New York in 1988, and performances in many other countries have made it the most widely produced of all Lloyd Webber’s shows. Aspects of Love was Lloyd Webber’s most musically ambitious show to date when it opened in London in 1989, and it ran for 1,325 performances.

In 1991, having bought back the copyright of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat from its original publisher, he revised it and brought it to the stage in a new production, which began a run in London of more than a thousand performances, and also played in Toronto (1992, starring Donny Osmond) and New York (1993). Also in 1993 Lloyd Webber’s new musical Sunset Boulevard, based on the film by Billy Wilder, opened in London to mixed reviews, before the US production opened in Los Angeles. After this run the show moved to Broadway, where it had record pre-run bookings of US$38 million. This production too won seven Tony Awards.

In 1998, Lloyd Webber and Jim Steinman wrote Whistle Down the Wind, a musical based on the classic film of the same title, transposed to a setting in the American Deep South in the late 1950s. It featured an eclectic mix of musical styles appropriate to the time and place of its setting, and songs from the show produced hit singles for artists as diverse as Boyzone and Meat Loaf. A new musical, The Beautiful Game, written with writer and comedian Ben Elton, opened in London's West End in 2000 but closed the following year. For his next project, Lloyd Webber collaborated with director Shekhar Kapur, composer A. R. Rahman, and writer Meera Syal to produce Bombay Dreams, a musical inspired by the Bollywood film genre, which opened in London in June 2002. The 2004 production of The Woman in White, adapted from the sensation novel by Wilkie Collins and directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, divided critics: while some applauded the maturity of Lloyd Webber’s latest score, others commented that the show veered too far from its original source.

Lloyd Webber next turned to television, with the BBC talent show How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? (2006), to search for a new star to lead a stage revival of The Sound of Music, which opened starring Connie Fisher in the role of Maria at the London Palladium in 2006. He repeated the formula the following year with Any Dream Will Do, in which Lee Mead was the winner of a television contest to star in a new West End production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He also produced a film version of The Phantom of the Opera in 2004, directed by Joel Schumacher.

In 1977 Lloyd Webber founded an entertainment company, the Really Useful Group, which jointly runs Really Useful Theatres (see West End Theatres). He was also from an early age a keen art collector, and in 2003 a large number of Pre-Raphaelite paintings from his collections went on display at the Royal Academy, London. During interviews at the time Lloyd Webber spoke of plans to build a gallery and the possibility of his leaving the collection to the nation. He was knighted in 1992, and was created a life peer in 1996.