Andrew Lloyd Webber, properly styled and widely known as The Lord Lloyd-Webber, has a biography that reads as a reincarnation of historic music geniuses. He has created some of the greatest and most recognizable musicals of all time. The complexity and the appeal of his music and writing have earned him many awards including Tonys, Grammys, Academy Awards, and even a Kennedy Center Honors Award. His recognition even extends to knighthood, becoming one of the Queen’s life peers and earning him a seat as a Conservative member of the House of Lords.
Lloyd Webber was born in London on March 22, 1948, to William Lloyd Webber and Jean Johnstone Lloyd. His father was the director of the London Royal College of Music and his mother, a piano teacher of the college. Lloyd Webber was a true prodigy at the age of three, he was playing the violin; at six, he was composing music; and at the age of nine, he was published in the Music Teacher magazine. While still young, Lloyd Webber pursued his childhood dream of becoming England’s Chief Inspector of ancient monuments. In 1965 he entered Westminster School as a Queen’s Scholar and began a course in history at Magdalen College, Oxford. But at the same time his true passion was calling him, and by winter of the same year he dropped out to study at the Royal College of Music. There he began to explore his interests in musical theatre.

While in school, at the age of 17, Lloyd Webber received a letter from the then 21-year-old law student by the name of Tim Rice. It read, “Dearest Andrew, I’ve been told you’re looking for a ‘with it’ writer of lyrics for your songs, and as I’ve been writing pop songs for a while and particularly enjoy writing the lyrics, I wonder if you consider it worth your while meeting me. Tim Rice.” In fact Lloyd Webber did find what he was looking for, and this began one of the greatest musical partnerships of all time.

Lloyd Webber and Rice began working on their first musical, The Likes of Us, by the end of 1965. The musical never reached the stage until 2005, but it did allow them to market. The pair was soon commissioned by Alan Doggett, the head of preparatory school in West London, to write a religious concert. Over the next few months, they crafted a 20-minute version of what would soon become Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This show is a retelling of the biblical story of Joseph, which debuted on March 1, 1968, and was an instant success. With each performance, the show would grow under Lloyd Webber and Rice’s direction, ending up with a two-hour run time. The success of the show led to a record with Decca for an album that was cut January of 1969. Their next project of the same year also followed the biblical theme, this was Jesus Christ Superstar. Within Superstar the pair wielded both pop music and classical operatic form, and the two began their tradition of recording an album’s worth of music first and then producing the play from it as well.

In 1974, with their next project, Jeeves, Rice lost interest and dropped out. Lloyd Webber had playwright Alan Ayckbourn to fill in, but the musical never saw great success. It wasn’t long after that Rice and Lloyd Webber reunited to create Evita as another concept album. The song “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” was a remarkable hit, skyrocketing the popularity of the musical. It hit London in 1978 and moved to Broadway just the following year. The 1980’s marked the end of the Lloyd Webber and Rice collaboration, but also Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster era. The first of the era was Cats, which was based off of the works of T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats picked up where a missing lyricist left off. Cats played a total of 16,484 times between London and New York, with its final performance in London on May 11, 2002.

After Lloyd Webber’s 21 years of blinding success with Cats, he continued writing and composing, eventually finishing Starlight Express in 1984. It was a commercial hit that had a record run on the West End, but less than two years on Broadway. Next came the longest running productions ever on Broadway, The Phantom of the Opera. This legendary musical’s lyrics were written by Charles Hart and the show itself was inspired by Gaston Leroux’s novel of the same name. In 2004, Lloyd Webber produced a movie adaptation for the play, which entertained more mainstream and realistic voices of the actors, opening it up to a wider audience within the general public.

His awards include 1 Oscar and 1 Golden Globe for best original song, 7 Tony awards, 7 Oliver awards, 3 Grammy awards, 14 Ivor Novello awards, American Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, Richard Rodgers award for Excellence in Musical Theatre, London Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical, 2 International Emmy awards, three of the longest-running musicals in history, and he is the first person to have a trio of musicals running in New York and London.