MUSICAL MAESTRO’S JOURNEY BACK FROM DESPAIR
HE IS a multi-millionaire impresario with some of the world’s best-loved musicals to his name. On the surface Andrew Lloyd Webber is a man who really does seem to have it all. In a career spanning five decades the 69-year-old, who came to prominence when he began collaborating with Tim Rice, has shown a magic touch.
His fortune is estimated at £750million and many of London’s top theatres are part of his business empire. He has also been a TV talent show judge while home is a 4,500-acre estate in Hampshire.
However Lloyd Webber reveals, while discussing his new book, that he has contemplated suicide three times, most recently suffering suicidal thoughts only three years ago.
He has occasionally struggled with mental health issues from childhood and for all his success the composer, responsible for Evita, Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Phantom Of The Opera, admits that he is a perfectionist who has always been haunted by fear of failure. In his memoir, Unmasked, Lloyd Webber, who has been married three times and has five children, also writes about his infidelity.
Born in London in 1948 he was a prodigy and began composing when he was nine. But uncertainty about whether he would ever achieve his dreams was the catalyst for the first thoughts of taking his own life.
While still at school, where he was bullied, Lloyd Webber found himself sitting on a Tube clutching a stash of pills stolen from his parents. He then somehow ended up catching a bus to Lavenham in Suffolk, where he was jolted out of his despair by its beauty. “It was one of those moments where everything got on top of me,” Lloyd Webber says. “These things are illogical.”
THEN in the 1960s he failed his basic army test, again triggering depression. That time he went as far as taking an overdose of painkillers. It was in that decade that he was introduced to Tim Rice and they first collaborated on a musical about children’s homes founder Thomas Barnardo.
They couldn’t secure a backer but struck musical gold with their next attempt, based on the biblical story of Joseph. The result, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, remains one of the most enduring shows of all time.
The description “lyrics by Tim Rice, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber” became a familiar refrain. He and Rice became one of the most successful double acts in all forms of entertainment but there were sometimes creative tensions. “I think he will say that I was a nagging perfectionist and Tim was too easy-going,” says Lloyd Webber.
He admits there were tantrums but these days he’s calmer, helped by becoming teetotal after he realised a few years ago that he was drinking too much.
In 2009 Lloyd Webber, who has composed 13 musicals, confirmed that he was being treated for prostate cancer and had lifesaving surgery. Health problems were the cause of contemplating suicide for a third time. He began suffering crippling back pain, which an operation did not cure.
“It was absolute agony and utterly despairing,” he says. “I did think of suicide. It was so painful and I couldn’t sleep and you go on thinking about it. You have all those ridiculous painkillers and none of them working and you just think, ‘I shall take the lot of them.’”
Eventually treatment by an osteopath brought relief but he has revealed in the past that he considered assisted dying and went as far as obtaining forms from Dignitas.
“With hindsight it was stupid and ridiculous,” he later said. “But I couldn’t think what to do. I went through a moment of deep depression – that awful moment when you think you must find a way out.” Lloyd Webber praises his third wife, the former horse rider Madeleine Gurdon who is 14 years his junior, for supporting him through his dark times. They have been married since 1991 and have three children but his personal life has not always been so stable.
The composer cheated on his first wife Sarah Hugill, the mother of his first two children, with singer Sarah Brightman who was later cast in The Phantom Of The Opera.
The couple announced their engagement on the day his divorce came through and he subsequently married Brightman, with whom he was “head over heels in love”, in 1984. The celebrity couple divorced six years later and Lloyd Webber admits that he has not always been a good husband.
Knighted in 1992, he became Lord Lloyd-Webber in 1997 until his retirement from Parliament last year and through his foundation is a generous patron of the arts. He has said that he won’t leave his fortune to his children because he wants them to learn the value of hard work.
Following the health scares, life is back on an even keel for the musical theatre legend and he will celebrate his 70th birthday next month in an optimistic mood.
Yet the black dog of depression can return at any time. The composer, who was once credited with “almost single-handedly re-inventing the musical”, certainly won’t take his current happiness for granted.