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 and The Scaffold.
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".[11]
Rice 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, and November 2016 to 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.[13]
Beginning in the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in partnership with Broadway Podcast Network, Rice has presented Get Onto My Cloud, a podcast retrospective of his career.[14] A number of episodes feature verbatim excerpts of his autobiography, and all include various recordings of his, and other associated musicians', work.
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.[15]
Rice was the president of the London Library, the largest independent lending library in Europe from 2017–2022.[16]
Rice is a patron of the London-based drama school, Associated Studios[19] and was for several years, a patron of Thame Players Theatre along with Bruce Alexander.[20]
On 19 August 1974, Rice married Jane Artereta, daughter of Colonel Alexander Henry McIntosh, OBE,[4] and former wife of producer and talent agent Michael Whitehall,[24] 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.[25] 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.[26] 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.[27] 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.[28] He has a third daughter, Charlotte Cordelia Violet Christina, from a relationship with Laura-Jane Foley, a writer. He has seven grandchildren.[29]
Despite having no familial or personal ties to the club, Rice has been a fan of Sunderland AFC since his early childhood.[30]
Political views
Rice was a supporter of the Conservative Party, but, in 2007, stated that the party were no longer interested in him and that his relationship with them had "irrevocably changed."[31] Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, both supporters of Margaret Thatcher, attended her funeral in 2013.[32]
Rice raised funds for the Euro No campaign in 2000.[33] In 2014, he donated £7,500 to the UK Independence Party.[34] In May 2016, he told The Spectator that he would vote for Brexit in the following month's referendum on the issue, saying: "It would be good to spend one's final years as part of a truly independent nation once more." He said he had voted to remain in the European Economic Community in 1975 "from a standpoint of ignorance".[35]
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."[36]
Wealth
According to The Sunday TimesRich List of the UK's richest millionaires, Rice is worth £155 million as of 2020.[3]
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,[37] 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,[38] 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."
1992 – Tycoon with music by Michel Berger (English-language adaptation of the 1979 French musical Starmania, with original French lyrics by Luc Plamondon)
2011 – The Wizard of Oz with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber for 6 new songs; also additional lyrics for 4 songs with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. The remaining 13 songs are solely by Arlen and Harburg.
2011 – Aladdin with music by Alan Menken and additional lyrics by Howard Ashman and Chad Beguelin. Based on the film.
"That's All I Need", written with Elton John, for The Lion King 1½ (2004). Snippets of songs originally written by the pair for The Lion King also feature in the film.
"Peterloo", was requested by Sir Malcolm Arnold's estate to write lyrics to the Peterloo Overture [commemorating the horrific St Peter's Fields Massacre and maiming of men, women and children at a meeting in Manchester in Aug 1819]. There was in mind to use it in 2012 for the Olympics or for the Queen's Jubilee celebrations [60 years on throne] but instead it had its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in London at 'The Last Night of the Proms' on Saturday 13 September 2014 which was broadcast on BBC television.[42][43]
