Charles Hart (lyricist)

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For other persons of the same name, see Charles Hart.

Charles Hart (born June 3,1961 in London) is a British lyricist, songwriter and musician. He attended Robinson College, Cambridge and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. was born in London and educated in Maidenhead and Cambridge. He lives and works in London and Suffolk.

He is best known for writing the lyrics to Andrew Lloyd Webber's phenomenally successful stage musical The Phantom of the Opera, which has since been produced as a film. He also co-wrote (with Don Black) the lyrics to Lloyd Webber's 1989 musical Aspects of Love, based on the novel by David Garnett.

He began writing lyrics as a child and first seriously contemplated turning his talent into a profession in the 1970s when his grandmother - Angela Baddeley, an actress - was on stage in a London production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.^[1]

"When I was at the Guildhall I sent a tape to [Stephen] Sondheim, fully expecting a reply hailing the next true genius of the West End," he said in a rare interview in The Times. "All I got was a note saying that I had 'rhyming poison' which got in the way of my characters and plot, and of course he was entirely right. But my ambition was to be an English Sondheim.

"Being a lyricist is the ideal job for a university-educated dilettante, because it uses up all the rubbish in your education."^[2]

He attracted the attention of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh when they were judges for the Vivian Ellis awards, in which Hart was a finalist for his musical based on Moll Flanders.

Lloyd Webber hired him as a lyricist for The Phantom of the Opera a year later.

In 1993, he also created new lyrics for Der Vampyr, to create The Vampyr - A Soap Opera for BBC Television. Other projects include both words and music for television (Watching and Split Ends, Granada TV) and radio (Love Songs, BBC Radio). His most recent work, Two Studies for String Quartet, received its premiere in February 2005 at London's Purcell Room, performed by the Sacconi Quartet.

He has received two Ivor Novello Awards and has been nominated twice for a Tony Award.

Charles Hart is also a photographer. His photographic work has appeared on posters and in playbills, as well as publications ranging from Attitude to the Daily Telegraph, and in 2003 he was one of three photographers to feature in an exhibition organized by UNICEF to celebrate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

He now enjoys spending time in the English countryside and has three pet goldfish from whom he is seldom separated called Wellgunde, Flosshilde and Janice.