Among his awards are an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, seven Tony Awards, six Laurence Olivier Awards, three Grammy Awards, 14 Ivor Novello Awards, a Triple Play Award from ASCAAP, entry into the American Songwriters' Hall of Fame and the Richard Rodgers Award for Excellence in Musical Theater. "The Beautiful Game," Lloyd Webber's heartbreaking musical about soccer against a background of sectarian war in Northern Ireland, was his first to receive the London Critics' Circle Award. He was knighted in 1992 and created an honorary life peer in 1997.
Lloyd Webber bought the Palace Theatre in 1983 and now owns and has restored seven London theaters including the Palladium and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. He is the founder of the Open Churches Trust, an ecumenical organization devoted to the restoration and opening to all of formerly locked churches and synagogues to enable the public to experience these architectural treasures.
Lloyd Webber is a native Londoner, born in South Kensington. His father is the composer William Lloyd Webber, his mother is the pianist and educator Jean Johnstone Lloyd Webber and his younger brother is the world-renowned cellist Julian Lloyd Webber. Andrew was a Queen's Scholar in history at Magdalen College, Oxford, but his studies were sidetracked by his passion for music. He was still a teenager when he met Tim Rice, then a 21-year-old law student, and the two found themselves inventing rock opera and transforming musical theater with "Joseph…" and the international hit "Jesus Christ Superstar."
What followed, with the prolific Rice as well as with several other collaborators, is the stuff of musical history. No one, including Lloyd Webber, could have predicted that his trajectory would move from the life of Jesus to the travails of P. G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves," or that these would lead to the Brechtian bite of "Evita." No one ever seriously considered T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to be a possible subject for a musical.
Yet, it was a childhood favorite of Lloyd Webber and was transformed by this genius who, in the process, made musical history. The monumental opulence of "The Phantom of the Opera," itself from the surprising source of a long-forgotten Gaston Leroux novel, did not prepare musical lovers for the delicate, intimate adult pleasures of "Aspects of Love," a masterpiece of chamber opera that happens to work as a musical.
Lloyd Webber bought the Palace Theatre in 1983 and now owns and has restored seven London theaters including the Palladium and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. He is the founder of the Open Churches Trust, an ecumenical organization devoted to the restoration and opening to all of formerly locked churches and synagogues to enable the public to experience these architectural treasures.
Lloyd Webber is a native Londoner, born in South Kensington. His father is the composer William Lloyd Webber, his mother is the pianist and educator Jean Johnstone Lloyd Webber and his younger brother is the world-renowned cellist Julian Lloyd Webber. Andrew was a Queen's Scholar in history at Magdalen College, Oxford, but his studies were sidetracked by his passion for music. He was still a teenager when he met Tim Rice, then a 21-year-old law student, and the two found themselves inventing rock opera and transforming musical theater with "Joseph…" and the international hit "Jesus Christ Superstar."
What followed, with the prolific Rice as well as with several other collaborators, is the stuff of musical history. No one, including Lloyd Webber, could have predicted that his trajectory would move from the life of Jesus to the travails of P. G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves," or that these would lead to the Brechtian bite of "Evita." No one ever seriously considered T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to be a possible subject for a musical.
Yet, it was a childhood favorite of Lloyd Webber and was transformed by this genius who, in the process, made musical history. The monumental opulence of "The Phantom of the Opera," itself from the surprising source of a long-forgotten Gaston Leroux novel, did not prepare musical lovers for the delicate, intimate adult pleasures of "Aspects of Love," a masterpiece of chamber opera that happens to work as a musical.
Then again, everything Lloyd Webber does seem to work. "He's slightly crazy," said Elaine Paige, who created the tragic role of Evita and also had a memorable run as Lloyd Webber's deluded Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard." "His mind just darts from one thing to another. It's quite staggering, really." Crazy and quite staggering; that is the stuff of musical genius.
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