Andrew Lloyd Webber Says He’s a Recovering Alcoholic

Andrew Lloyd Webber spoke with The Times about his addiction to alcohol, saying in a profile published Saturday (April 18) that he started a current journey to sobriety more than a year ago. The 78-year-old composer, who’s an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony winner), says checking into a rehab clinic “didn’t work,” but joining AA meetings is something he’s “adored.”

“I am a recovering alcoholic,” he told publication. “Sixteen months ago I decided that I needed help and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Though he’d previously talked about quitting drinking in 2015 and 2016, while producing School of Rock on Broadway, Lloyd Webber says he’d started to drink again.

“I was doing what they call ‘white-knuckling’, without any backup, and I started to worry that I wasn’t being creative. And I thought, ‘But I’ve said to everybody that I’m not drinking.’ So I started to drink secretly,” he told The Times.

Lloyd Webber, whose Cats: The Jellicle Ball is presently on Broadway, says he began “getting into a downhill spiral and about 18 months ago the family were in a desperate state, and added, “My wife was feeling she couldn’t go on.”

“When you’re a wine drinker, you don’t think of yourself as… well, alcoholics drink spirits,” he added in the interview. “That was the shocking thing for me, when I realized that I was drinking vodka to hide it.”

“I’m lucky that nothing did go very wrong. I haven’t had some frightful accident. But then you begin to think of the near misses,” he admitted.

“I thought that I was getting away with it,” said Lloyd Webber. “The thing is, I am deeply sorry and I can only apologize to people if I made a mess.”

On attending AA meetings, which he now attends daily, he shared, “People had always said, ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t like that.’ And you get this thought that it’s a load of meth drinkers coming in off the streets. Not at all. What I love about it is you go into a room and everybody’s equal. I’ve made friends that I wouldn’t have thought possible.” 

When asked whether he’d written any of his musicals while drinking, he said, “Probably not a lot, but I can think of a couple of songs that have been hits where I’d definitely had a glass of wine and thought, that was all right.”

Lloyd Weber is currently working on two new musicals, according to The Times — one that’s based on the 2006 film The Illusionist and the other based on the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911.