- Born
- Birth nameTimothy Miles Bindon Rice
- Height6′ 4″ (1.93 m)
- A prolific lyricist and librettist, Tim Rice was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. He was educated at Aldwickbury School in Hertfordshire, St Albans School and finally Lancing College. He briefly attended Sorbonne Université. He was considering a legal career around the time that he met Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1965. Three years later, the two young men composed a 20-minute pop oratorio that would eventually become "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat". The piece was premiered on 1st March 1968 at the Colet Court School in the City of London. During the following months, Rice and Webber lengthened the oratorio to 30 minutes, and a record album of "Joseph" (with Rice singing the role of "Pharaoh") was made at the end of 1968.
Remaining in partnership with Webber, his next project was "Jesus Christ Superstar". Introduced to the public as a concept album in 1970, the opera propelled Rice and Webber to international stardom. Staged versions appeared the following year, and their popularity led to the film Jesus Christ Superstar (1973).
Following "Superstar", Rice and Webber returned to their previous project and expanded it into (more or less) its finalised form. The concept album for "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" was released in 1974.
Inexplicably eclipsed by his collaborator, Rice may never have received the acclaim that he deserved for his contributions to the partnership. The death-throws of the Rice-Webber collaboration produced a third opera, called "Evita". Its concept album was released in 1976.
Rice continued on with a piece called "Blondel", which appeared in 1983. Set to music by Stephen Oliver, "Blondel" was arguably the most comic and witty of Rice's major works. The opera "Chess" followed, with its concept album arriving in 1984. Former ABBA songwriters Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson provided the music for "Chess", and the concept album was an international hit. "Chess" was staged in London in 1986 with great success, but the 1988 Broadway production was radically revised without Rice's knowledge or permission, and it was quickly shut down.
In 1987 Rice was asked by Freddie Mercury and Mike Moran to write lyrics for Freddie's album with Montserrat Caballé "Barcelona", released in 1988, one entitled "The Fallen Priest" and the other "The Golden Boy".
In 1991, he was hired to finish the lyrics for the Walt Disney film Aladdin (1992). Disney subsequently teamed him with Elton John for The Lion King (1994). Rice also composed additional lyrics for the stage version of Disney's film Beauty and the Beast (1991), which opened on Broadway in 1994. A stage version of The Lion King (1994) opened on Broadway in 1997, as he was working with Elton John on two new projects - "Aida", which opened on Broadway in 2000, and the Dreamworks film The Road to El Dorado (2000).
The 1991 to 2000 period also saw a flurry of activity for Tim Rice's earlier works. Major revival productions of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" were staged in many parts of the world. Additionally, there was the film Evita (1996), as well as the video-films Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (1991), and Jesus Christ Superstar (2000).
Apart from theatre and film, Rice has written recurring columns for UK newspapers, as well as having shown up regularly on BBC Radio and Television. In 1973, he founded a cricket side - The Heartaches - for which he serves as a manager as well as a player. He also makes regular contributions to various cricket magazines. He continues to have projects in development for the theatre and for film. Most anxiously awaited - especially by audiences in Canada and the United States - is, perhaps, a revival of the authentic 1986 London version of "Chess".- IMDb Mini Biography By: Liberty Salinger <liberty_salinger@hotmail.com>
- SpouseJane McIntosh(August 19, 1974 - present) (2 children)
- Children
- RelativesJo Rice(Sibling)
- Was working on lyrics for The Lion King (1994) when he was approached at the last minute by Jeffrey Katzenberg to write lyrics for Aladdin (1992) because Aladdin's original lyricist, Howard Ashman, had passed away.
- Was knighted in 1994
- Wrote songs with Andrew Lloyd Webber that were not intended for musicals including a song "It's Easy For You" recorded by Elvis Presley in 1976.
- Originally wrote the lyrics for the song "Memory" for the Andrew Lloyd Webber -Trevor Nunn stage musical Cats. However, the show's director Trevor Nunn and Lloyd Webber had problems with his lyrics, which eventually led to Lloyd Webber commissioning Nunn to write his own lyrics for the tune. This drove a final nail into the already-splintered relationship between Tim Rice and Lloyd Webber, whose feud dates back to the days of their work on the original Evita concept album.
- Supporter and promoter of the British Conservative Party.
- [on Elton John] As you can tell by looking at his great oeuvre with Bernie, his songs cover a wide range of styles, from hard rock to beautiful ballads, a bit of country influence, blues influence, so he's able to take a lyric and do lots of different things with it.
- Nowadays, I think most composers, if it's a team, if it's A and B, one doing music, one doing lyrics, it would tend to be the music would come first, and with nearly everybody I've worked with that's been the case. The one great exception is Elton, who will only write a tune if he's got a lyric, so all those wonderful hits he's written with Bernie Taupin, they all came from Bernie first.
- We are chronically short of original musicals, and if there are original musicals, great ones like Matilda or Billy Elliot, they're often written by people like Sir Elton who've been around for quite a while, and what we need is new, young composers.
- I think any song, to become a standard, i.e. a song that will be sung by lots of different people in different styles, I think you've got to have a good lyric as well as a great tune.
- [on Tony Christie] Tony has a timeless voice. If he has a song that tells a story, there's no one better really.
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