His first wife was Sarah Hugill. They married on 24 July 1972 and had two children, Imogen (born 31 March 1977) and Nicholas (born 2 July 1979). Lloyd Webber and Hugill were divorced in 1983. He then married singer and dancer Sarah Brightman on 22 March 1984. He cast Brightman as the lead in The Phantom of the Opera; however, the marriage did not last, and they divorced in 1990, though remaining friends. He married his present wife, Madeleine Gurdon, on 1 February 1991, and had three more children: Alastair (born 3 May 1992), William (born 24 August 1993), and Isabella (born 30 April 1996).
He was knighted in 1992 and created a life peer in 1997 as Baron Lloyd-Webber, of Sydmonton in the County of Hampshire. (His peerage title is hyphenated but his surname is not.) He is ranked the 87th richest Briton in the Sunday Times Rich List 2006 with an estimated wealth of £700m.
Politically, he had been an active supporter and promoter of the Conservative Party, even writing special music for a party political broadcast. However, in recent years, he has distanced himself from the Conservatives.
Lord Lloyd-Webber is an art collector with a passion for Victorian art. An exhibition of works from his collection was presented at the Royal Academy in 2003 under the title Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters—The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection.
Professional career
Lloyd Webber first gained success at the age of nineteen, when he and Tim Rice were commissioned to write Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for Colet Court, a prep school, in 1968. The musical was a hit; a slightly rewritten version was soon produced by the Edinburgh Festival. Lloyd Webber and Rice continued to collaborate and later produced Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Evita (1976), both of which were released as albums before being brought to the stage and later to film. The two parted ways soon after, and Lloyd Webber's next large success was 1981's Cats. Lloyd Webber defied convention by writing the score to existing lyrics by a deceased author, rather than having a living collaborator provide the words. The lyrics were based on T.S. Eliot's 1939 Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which Lloyd Webber confessed was a childhood favourite. Interestingly, the lyrics to the show's monster hit "Memory" were mostly the product of director Trevor Nunn's reworking of an unrelated, non-Possum Eliot poem. Cats was the longest running Broadway musical, spanning a reign of more than twenty years. Next, he wrote Starlight Express, which was a commercial hit but panned by the critics. In 1986, he premiered his next musical, The Phantom of the Opera, inspired by the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. Although met with mixed reviews in New York, it became a hit and is still running; in January 2006 it overtook Cats as the longest-running musical on Broadway. His many other musical theatre works include The Likes of Us, Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind, Song and Dance, The Beautiful Game and The Woman in White. While some of his works have had enormous commercial success, his career has not been without failures, especially in the United States. Song and Dance, Starlight Express, and Aspects of Love, all successes in London, did not meet the same reception in New York, and all lost money in short, critically panned runs. In 1995, Sunset Boulevard became a very successful Broadway show, winning seven Tony Awards, although owing to high weekly costs, it too lost a large amount of money. His subsequent shows (Whistle Down the Wind and The Beautiful Game) did not make it to Broadway, and his most recent musical The Woman in White closed after a very short run in New York. This closing is largely credited to star Maria Friedman's frequent absences due to breast cancer.
Many of his stage musicals have been taken onto the big screen. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) was directed by Norman Jewison, Evita (1996) was directed by Alan Parker, and most recently The Phantom of the Opera was directed by Joel Schumacher (and co-produced by Lloyd Webber). He was asked to write a piece for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics entitled "Amigos Para Siempre".
He has also composed for film. In 1984, he took a different musical style, composing his Requiem in memory of his father, who had died in 1982.
Lloyd Webber produced Bombay Dreams with Indian composer A. R. Rahman in 2002.
Shows
The Likes of Us (1965) (Tim Rice)
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968) (Tim Rice)
Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) (Tim Rice)
Jeeves (1975) / reworked as By Jeeves (1996) (Alan Ayckbourn) (based on P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster novels)
Evita (1976) (Tim Rice)
Cats (1981) (based on T. S. Eliot in 1939)
Tell Me On a Sunday (1979) (Don Black) which was combined with a dance performance of Variations to become Song and Dance (1982)
Starlight Express (1984) (Richard Stilgoe)
The Phantom of the Opera (1986) (Richard Stilgoe/Charles Hart)(based on G. Leroux in 1911)
Aspects of Love (1989) (Don Black/Charles Hart) (Based on the novel by David Garnett)
Sunset Boulevard (1993) (Don Black/Christopher Hampton) (Based on the film by Billy Wilder)
Whistle Down the Wind (first version - 1996; second version and an official cast recording - 1998) (Jim Steinman) (Based on the novel by Mary Hayley Bell)
The Beautiful Game (2000) (Ben Elton)
The Woman in White (2004) (David Zippel) (Book by Charlotte Jones, based on the novel by Wilkie Collins)
In each case the lyricist is given in parentheses.
Trivia
Lloyd Webber shares his birthdate, March 22, with fellow show composer Stephen Sondheim - though Sondheim is 18 years older.
Andrew Lloyd Webber History
and Biography
Books about music