Rice Tim

He has been one of the world's top lyricists and librettists since the 1960s. He studied law, first in Sussex, England, and later at the Sorbonne in Paris. After returning to England, he worked briefly in a law firm, but soon left his legal career to work with the EMI record company. As an aspiring songwriter, he approached Andrew Lloyd Webber with an offer to collaborate. Their collaborative debut, The Likes of Us (1965), languished in their drawers for many decades and was first performed semi-publicly at the so-called Sydmonton Festival at Lloyd Webber's summer home in 2005. Their first publicly performed work was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968), in a half-hour school production, but it gradually began to take full-length form in the early 1970s and has been in the category of musical superlatives since the 1990s. In fact, the first musical to gain worldwide notoriety was Jesus Christ Superstar (1971). Tim Rice was fascinated by the fate of the Argentine dictator's wife, and so persuaded Lloyd Webber to create the musical Evita (1978). Although it achieved virtually the same popularity as Jesus Christ Superstar, it became the swan song of the two writers' decade-long collaboration. Rice then teamed up with members of the popular group ABBA and together they staged the musical Chess in London in the mid-1980s. This time, the story took the audience into the world of the royal game at the highest level during the height of the Cold War. Chess was given a new look in 2008 when it was staged in concert form at London's Royal Albert Hall for symphony orchestra, twenty soloists and a 100-strong chorus. Tim Rice was the instigator and spiritual father of this production. Other world-renowned successes include the musicals The Lion King (1997) and AIDA (2000), which Rice co-wrote with composer Elton John. Equally popular was the family fairy-tale musical Beauty and the Beast (1994), for which Alan Menken composed the music. In this case, as with The Lion King, the theatrical release was preceded by a Walt Disney-produced film. Rice's oeuvre is, of course, much richer than this brief list. Tim Rice founded Pavilion Books in 1981. He has authored dozens of Guinness books charting the history of popular music. He is an avid and respected cricketer, even owning one cricket club. Among the awards he has won for his work are four Tony Awards and three Academy Awards. In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain knighted him and bestowed upon him the title of Sir Timothy.