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Michael Crawford
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Michael Crawford is a 30-something husband and father. He has been writing seriously since mid high school, but teachers have encouraged his talent since elementary school. Crawford was born in Oklahoma but was raised all across the Southern states, finally stopping in Virginia (Hampton Roads) until graduation and then making his way to New Orleans. He currently does live performances for junior highs, high schools and colleges. He is well on his way to making poetry a career. Keep your eyes and ears open--you'll see him one day.
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Michael Patrick Dumble-Smith (born January 19, 1942), better known as Michael Crawford, is one of Britain's leading actors, so much so that he was voted into the Top "100 Greatest Britons" in a 2002 poll sponsored by the BBC. Crawford began his acting career as a seven-year-old, appearing in the premiֳ¨re of Benjamin Britten's work for children, Let's Make an Opera. Although he most often appears in musicals, he became known to millions for his role as the hapless Frank Spencer in the television sitcom, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, for which he performed most of his own stunts. It was one of the BBC's most successful series of all time.
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In 1995, Michael Crawford signed on to perform the leading roles in a new Las Vegas extravaganza, "EFX!" The $40 million production, written especially for Michael (and at some points, by Michael), is currently playing at the MGM Grand. Michael left "EFX!" in the fall of 1996, due to the return of a hip/groin injury incurred earlier in the difficult physical stunts of the show. On January 26, 1998, Michael filed suit against the MGM Grand for the termination of his contract at EFX and for the physical problems he incurred allegedly as a result of his work there. (N.B., it seems the case settled out of court.) This came after a series of movements on Michael's part, apparently in a bid to return to the public eye.
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Alternating between television series and award-winning roles in theatre during the '70s, Michael Crawford broke out with his title role in the musical Barnum, which earned him several awards and proved a smash hit. He toured with the show during the early '80s, and Barnum's popularity was the decisive factor in Andrew Lloyd Webber's casting of him opposite Sarah Brightman in The Phantom of the Opera in 1986. The musical earned him immense critical praise, a Tony Award, and a hit single, "The Music of the Night," which reached the British Top Ten. Signed to Atlantic that same year, Crawford released Songs from the Stage & Screen, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. After touring with The Phantom of the Opera across Great Britain, North America and Australia, Crawford recorded his second album With Love and set out on the road once more with a production of The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, recorded as his third full-length release. A Touch of Music in the Night followed in 1993, and two years later Michael Crawford mounted EFX, a $40 million production set at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, featuring Crawford playing five different parts. In the spring of 1998, Michael Crawford released On Eagle's Wings, a collection of spiritual songs; Live in Concert followed later that same year, and in 1999 he released In the Moon of Wintertime: Christmas with Michael Crawford.
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Michael Crawford was raised by his widowed mother, Doris, and her parents, Montague Pike and Edith Kathleen O'Keefe, whom Michael always called "Monty" and "Nan". Doris' first husband, Arthur Dumbell-Smith, had been killed during the Battle of Britain, less than a year after they married. Two years after his death, Michael was born, the result of a short-lived relationship, and given his mother's first husband's surname. During his early years, he would divide his time between the army camp in Wiltshire (where he and his mother were living during the war) and the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, with his mother and grandparents. However at the end of the war in 1945, his mother re-married a grocer named Den Ingram in 1945 and they moved to London. There Michael attended Oakfield Preparatory School, Dulwich, where he was known as Michael Ingram.
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Most popular to theatre audiences from his title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's version of The Phantom of the Opera, Michael Crawford was in fact a star of the British stage and screen for almost two decades before. Born in Wiltshire, England in 1942, he began singing in the school choir and while still a teenager, changed his name from Dumble-Smith to the more charismatic Crawford and began working in radio, television and film. After first stepping on the London stage in the early '60s, Crawford's first regular television series was the BBC's 1960s show Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life; he appeared in several films as well (The War Lover, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and a starring turn in How I Won the War, which ... featured John Lennon). Crawford moved to New York in 1967, and appeared in several small plays before Gene Kelly recruited him to star in the fim version of Hello, Dolly!, with Barbra Streisand. Other films proved less successful, and Crawford returned to England in the early '70s, winning an award for his role in the sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em.
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Michael Crawford