I thought about suicide, says Lloyd Webber
THE composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has revealed that he considered suicide as a teenager after becoming “deeply depressed” by his piano teacher mother’s infatuation with a prodigy pupil.
The celebrated composer also said that he contemplated killing himself as recently as three years ago.
His memoir, Unmasked, lays bare the depths of despair which counterbalanced the staggering heights of success he reached with musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera and Cats.
In 1963, when aged 15, Lord Lloyd-webber recalls he considered suicide after his mother became infatuated with the musical talents of a young pianist.
But a visit to a church in Lavenham, Suffolk, convinced him “things weren’t so bad after all”.
Another attempt to end his life followed in the Sixties when he was barred from attending a potentially fortune-changing appointment to have a song recorded after he failed an army test.
More recently, he almost succumbed again after bouts of severe back pain and being diagnosed with prostate cancer, the Mail on Sunday reported.
He said: “I did think of suicide. It was so painful and I couldn’t sleep and you go on thinking about it.”
His wife of 27 years, Madeleine Gurdon, provided a ray of light through dark times, however. “When I met Madeleine, it was almost like getting my life back,” he said. “A door has been unlocked back into a world that I’d perhaps missed in the previous years – people outside the theatre.”
Lord Lloyd-webber also wrote of a troubling episode of sexual assault: “A saddo tried to fondle me under cover of the tight standing crush on the Tube train.
“I was too shocked to make a fuss. But I was furious. So furious that it gave me an idea that maybe was big enough to call an epiphany.”
That afternoon he ditched a planned school recital for a song of his own that mocked the teachers and earned a rapturous reception.