Tim Rice

Sir Timothy Miles Bindon Rice (born 10 November 1944) is an English lyricist and author. He is best known for his collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber, with whom he wrote, among other shows, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita; with Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA, with whom he wrote Chess; and with Disney on Aladdin, The Lion King, the stage adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, and the original Broadway musical Aida. He also wrote lyrics for the Alan Menken musical King David, and for DreamWorks Animation's The Road to El Dorado.

Sir
Tim Rice
Rice in 1981
Background information
Birth nameTimothy Miles Bindon Rice
Born (1944-11-10) 10 November 1944
Shardeloes, Buckinghamshire, England
OriginAmersham, Buckinghamshire, England
Genres
  • Musical theatre
  • film
  • television
  • lyricist
  • author
Occupation(s)Lyricist
Years active1965–present
Associated acts
Websitetimrice.co.uk

Rice was knighted by Elizabeth II for services to music in 1994. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, is a Disney Legend recipient, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors. In addition to his awards in the UK, he is one of sixteen artists to have won an Emmy, Oscar, Grammy and Tony in the US.[1]

Rice twice hosted the Brit Awards (in 1983 and 1984). The 2016 Sunday Times Rich List values Rice at £150m; the 15th-richest music millionaire in the UK.[2]

Early life

Rice was born at Shardeloes, an historic English country house near Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England that was requisitioned as a maternity hospital during the Second World War. His father, Hugh Gordon Rice (1917-1988),[3] served with the Eighth Army and reached the rank of major during the Second World War, and afterward worked for the de Havilland Aircraft Company, becoming Far East representative, and for the Diplomatic Service, including as adviser to the Ministry of Overseas Development at Amman, Jordan. Rice's mother, Joan Odette (née Bawden; 1919–2009), daughter of an entrepreneur in the London fashion trade, served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as a photographic interpreter, and in her eighties became known as a writer on the publication of her wartime diaries.[4][5][6][7]

Education
Lancing College

Rice was educated at three independent schools: Aldwickbury School in Hertfordshire, St Albans School and Lancing College. He left Lancing with GCE A-Levels in History and French and then started work as an articled clerk for a law firm in London, having decided not to apply for a university place.[8] He later attended the Sorbonne in Paris for a year.

Career

Music industry

After studying for a year in Paris at the Sorbonne, Rice joined EMI Records as a management trainee in 1966. When EMI producer Norrie Paramor left to set up his own organization in 1968, Rice joined him as an assistant producer, working with, among others, Cliff Richard, The Scaffold.

Musical theatre

Rice became famous for his collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber, with whom he wrote Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cricket, The Likes of Us, and additional songs for the 2011 West End production of The Wizard of Oz. Joseph and Superstar were additionally known as two of the first hit musicals that drew their sound from the rock and pop music that became embedded in culture in the 1960s.

For The Walt Disney Company, Rice has collaborated individually with Alan Menken and Elton John, creating productions including Aladdin (winning an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Grammy Award for Song of the Year for "A Whole New World") and The Lion King (winning the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Can You Feel the Love Tonight").

In 1996, his collaboration with Lloyd Webber for the film version Evita won Rice his third Academy Award for Best Original Song with the song "You Must Love Me". Rice has also collaborated with Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA on Chess and with Rick Wakeman on the albums 1984 and Cost of Living. In 2009, he wrote the lyrics for Andrei Konchalovsky's critically panned reimagining of The Nutcracker, set to the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.[9]

Rice reunited with Andrew Lloyd Webber in 2011 to pen new songs for Lloyd Webber's newest production of The Wizard of Oz which opened in March 2011 at the London Palladium. Rice has since, however, rejected working with Lloyd Webber again, claiming their partnership has run its course, and they are "no longer relevant as a team".[10]

Media

On 9 November 1979, Rice hosted a highly publicised edition of Friday Night, Saturday Morning on the BBC which had a heated debate on the newly released film Monty Python's Life of Brian, a film that had been banned by many local councils and caused protests throughout the world with accusations that it was blasphemous (as the lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar, Rice himself had been accused of blasphemy a decade before). To argue in favour of this accusation were veteran broadcaster and noted Christian Malcolm Muggeridge, and Mervyn Stockwood (the Bishop of Southwark). In defence of the film were two members of the Monty Python team, John Cleese and Michael Palin.[11]

He has also been a frequent guest panellist for many years on the radio panel games Just a Minute and Trivia Test Match. Rice also made an appearance in the film About a Boy. The film includes several clips from an edition of the game show Countdown on which he was the guest adjudicator. His other interests include cricket (he was President of the MCC in 2002) and maths. He wrote the foreword to the book Why Do Buses Come In Threes by Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham, and featured prominently in Tony Hawks's One Hit Wonderland, where he co-wrote the song which gave Hawks a top twenty hit in Albania. On 2 December 2010 he addressed the eighth Bradman Oration in Adelaide. In October 2011, November and December 2016 and January and February 2017, Rice was guest presenter for the BBC Radio 2 show Sounds of the '60s, standing in for regular presenter Brian Matthew who was unwell.[12]

Literature

He released his autobiography Oh What a Circus: The Autobiography of Tim Rice in 1998, which covered his childhood and early adult life until the opening of the original London production of Evita in 1978. He also took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six Books for which he wrote a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible.[13]

Rice is the current President of The London Library, the largest independent lending library in Europe.[14]

Publishing

Along with his brother, Jo, and the radio presenters Mike Read and Paul Gambaccini, he was a co-founder of the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and served as an editor from 1977 to 1996. In September 1981, Rice, along with Colin Webb and Michael Parkinson, launched Pavilion Books, a publishing house with a publishing focus on music and the arts. He held it until 1997.[15][16]

Patronage

Rice is a patron of the London-based drama school, Associated Studios[17] and is also a patron of Thame Players Theatre along with Bruce Alexander.[18]

Honours

Rice was made a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1994[19] (entitling him to the address "Sir Tim Rice" or "Sir Tim"), was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999, and was named a Disney Legend in 2002.[19]

In 2008, Rice received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[20]

He is a fellow member of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.[21]

Personal life

On 19 August 1974, Rice married Jane Artereta, daughter of Colonel Alexander Henry McIntosh, OBE[3], and former wife of producer and talent agent Michael Whitehall.[22] The couple having met while working at Capital Radio. The marriage unravelled in the late 1980s after the British tabloid newspapers revealed that he had been conducting an affair with the singer Elaine Paige.[23] Jane retains the title Lady Rice as, despite obtaining a divorce decree nisi, the couple never made it absolute and therefore they remain technically married.

Lady Rice manages the family's 33,000 acre Dundonnell estate which Sir Tim Rice bought in 1998 for £2 million. She has won awards for her conservation work with red squirrels.[24] They have two children, Eva Jane Florence, a novelist and singer-songwriter, and Donald Alexander Hugh, a film director and theatre producer who also helps to run Dundonnell.[25] Eva, who was named after Eva Perón, is the author of the novel The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, which was a finalist for the British Book Award Best Read of the Year.

Rice has a second daughter, Zoe Joan Eleanor from a relationship with Nell Sully, an artist.[26] He has a third daughter, Charlotte Cordelia Violet Christina from a relationship with Laura-Jane Foley, a writer. As of 2017, he has seven grandchildren.[27]

Politics

Rice was a supporter of the Conservative Party, but in 2007 stated that the Conservatives were no longer interested in him and that his relationship with the Party had "irrevocably changed."[28] He was reported in early 2014 to be a donor for the UK Independence Party.[29] Despite his disenchantment with the Conservative Party, Rice joined Andrew Lloyd Webber, both supporters of Margaret Thatcher, at her funeral in 2013.[30]

He also raised funds for the Euro No campaign in 2000.[31]

Religion

Describing his religion, Rice stated in a 1982 interview, "Technically I'm Church of England, which is really nothing. But I don't follow it. I wouldn't say I was a Christian. I have nothing against it." Conversely, he also stated that he adapted the biblical stories of Joseph and Jesus to musicals because "I'd always rather take a true story over an untrue one."[32]

Wealth

According to The Sunday Times Rich List of the UK's richest millionaires, Rice is worth £152 million as of 2017.[33]

In 2015, Rice expressed his indebtedness to the journalist Angus McGill as "the man responsible for Andrew Lloyd Webber and I having our first song recorded". Speaking at McGill's funeral,[34] Rice told a tale from his days at EMI about trying to rig the results of the London Evening Standard Girl of the Year competition in 1967. As "glorified office boy", Rice was writing songs with Lloyd Webber and desperate to find anybody to record one of their songs. Rice and colleagues filled in 5,000 entry forms overnight voting for the contestant who was a singer, and delivered them to McGill, who supervised the competition. Rice said it was "a disgraceful act of dishonesty on my part... without actually breaking the rules". As a result, the Standard proclaimed two Girls of the Year and Rice's choice, Rosalind ("Ross") Hannaman,[35] was signed to EMI where she made her first record. Rice said at the funeral: "I owe [Angus] an awful lot, which is just one of the reasons why I'm here today."

Musical theatre

Film and television work

In addition to adaptations of his theatrical productions, Rice has worked on several original film and television projects:

Lyricist

Other work
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gollark: You can.
gollark: `set shell.allow_disk_startup false`
gollark: Yeees.
gollark: It wouldn't be very hard. I could probably write such a thing now.

References
  1. "John Legend, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice become EGOT winners". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 June 2019.
  2. "Sunday Times rich list 2016 for musicians". Daily Express. London. Retrieved 11 November 2016.
  3. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 3, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 2003, p. 3327
  4. "Joan Rice: author of Sand in My Shoes". Thetimes.co.uk. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
  5. "Google Groups". Groups.google.com. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
  6. "Tim Rice profile". Filmreference.com. Retrieved 28 September 2014.
  7. "Granny had a ball during the blitz". The Times. London. 6 August 2006. Archived from the original on 8 September 2011. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
  8. Rice, Tim (1999). Oh, What a Circus: The Autobiography. Coronet Books. p. . ISBN 0-340-65459-7.
  9. "Andrei Konchalovsky Talks 'The Nutcracker in 3D' [Exclusive]". Movieweb.com. 23 November 2010. Retrieved 3 October 2019.
  10. Matt Trueman (26 March 2012). "Tim Rice rules out collaborating again with Andrew Lloyd Webber". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 June 2013.
  11. Cleese and Palin relive the 1979 Life of Brian debate, BBC News. Retrieved 6 September 2019
  12. ""Episodes from Sounds of the 60s broadcast in 2011" at bbc.co.uk". BBC. Retrieved 28 September 2014.
  13. Archived 4 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  14. artonezero. "Patrons and Presidents". Londonlibrary.co.uk. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  15. "Capel & Land | Tim Rice (archived version, recent version no longer mentions it)". 2010. Archived from the original on 21 August 2011. Retrieved 2 January 2012.
  16. "Sir Tim Rice Career Synopsis". Timrice.co.uk. Retrieved 20 January 2015.
  17. "Associated Studios | Musical Theatre Courses London". Associated Studios.
  18. "The Players Theatre, Thame". Thame Players Theatre.
  19. "Disney Legends — Sir Tim Rice". D23.com. Retrieved 28 September 2014.
  20. Tim Rice. "Sir Tim Rice – Career Synopsis". Timrice.co.uk. Retrieved 13 October 2009.
  21. "Fellows – The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors". Basca.org.uk. Retrieved 28 September 2014.
  22. Nikkhah, Roya (27 November 2011). "Why Jane Rice wants to save the red squirrel". Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
  23. Hastings, Christopher. "Elaine Paige: Sex, drugs and musicals", The Daily Telegraph, 20 September 2008.
  24. Nikkhah, Roya (27 November 2011). "Why Jane Rice wants to save the red squirrel". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 11 November 2019.
  25. "Donald Rice". Independent Talent.
  26. The Telegraph Musicals are not the be all and end all says Tim Rice
  27. Helliker, Adam (16 October 2016). "Baby joy for 71 year old Sir Tim Rice with woman 37 years his junior". Daily Express.
  28. "Tim Rice: Tories no longer love me". The Guardian. Retrieved 28 September 2014.
  29. "Sir Tim Rice emerges as Ukip donor". The Daily Telegraph. 23 February 2014.
  30. "Jeremy Clarkson, Shirley Bassey and Tony Blair, but no Mikhail Gorbachev: Margaret Thatcher's funeral guest list announced". The Independent. 11 April 2013. Retrieved 27 June 2013.
  31. "BBC News | BUSINESS | Anti-euro campaign launched". news.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 17 February 2020.
  32. "Lyricist is Unreligious". News.google.com. Retrieved 28 September 2014.
  33. "The UK's richest 1,000". thesundaytimes.co.uk. Archived from the original on 26 September 2017. Retrieved 25 September 2017.
  34. "Angus McGill: The funeral and the wake". 47 Shoe Lane, 29 October 2015, retrieved 25 September 2017.
  35. Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber: The New Musical, Stephen Citron, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 114
  36. "First Lloyd Webber/Rice Collaboration on CD". Britishtheatreguide.info. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 28 September 2014.
  37. McNary, Dave (16 March 2015). "Disney's Live-Action 'Beauty and the Beast' Set for March 17, 2017". Variety. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  38. "Peterloo (choral version)". Faber Music. Archived from the original on 6 February 2017. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
  39. White, Michael (15 September 2014). "Last Night of the London Proms: A Sonic Potpourri". New York Times. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
  40. "Who's Who in Just A Minute!". just-a-minute.info.
Awards and achievements
Preceded by
Ronnie Corbett		 President of Lord's Taverners
1988–1990		 Succeeded by
Leslie Crowther

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