Hart was born in
London in 1961, the son of George Wilson Hart, an antiquarian book dealer, and Juliet Lavinia Hart (née Byam Shaw), actress. His parents had met as actors through theatre but his maternal grand-parents,
Glen Byam Shaw and
Angela Baddeley, continued actively working in theatre and music throughout his childhood. Hart began writing lyrics as a child, some of which were "dark and contemplative – precociously murderous and quite, quite feisty". He went to school in
Maidenhead over the same period when his grandmother was starring in a London stage production of
Stephen Sondheim's
A Little Night Music. Hart went on to study music at
Robinson College, Cambridge, followed by postgraduate studies at the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama in music composition in 1984. Soon after leaving Guildhall, Hart came to the attention of
Andrew Lloyd Webber and
Cameron Mackintosh, while they were judging the Vivian Ellis awards. Webber hired him as a lyricist for
The Phantom of the Opera a year later, which opened in 1986. In an interview published the day before the opening of
Phantom, Hart said, "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." In 1990, during
Stephen Sondheim’s tenure as “Professor of Musical Theatre” at
Oxford, Hart linked up with like-minded writers
George Stiles,
Anthony Drewe and
Howard Goodall, and in 1992, they founded the
Mercury Workshop. The collaborative merged with the
New Musical Alliance to become
Mercury Musical Developments in 1999 and is today a registered charity whose patron was Stephen Sondheim. Hart went on to collaborate with Howard Goodall on a number of successful musicals. ==Selected works==