Robert Stigwood
| Robert Stigwood | |
|---|---|
Robert Stigwood at the Golden Globe Awards, 1997.
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| Born |
Robert Colin Stigwood 16 April 1934 Port Pirie, South Australia, Australia |
| Died | 4 January 2016 (aged 81) London, England |
| Occupation | Impresario, producer |
| Years active | 1954–2016 |
| Known for |
Manager of: |
Robert Colin Stigwood (16 April 1934 – 4 January 2016) was an Australian-born British-resident music entrepreneur, film producer and impresario, best known for managing Cream and the Bee Gees, theatrical productions like Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar and film productions including the hugely successful Grease and Saturday Night Fever.
Stigwood was born in 1934 in Port Pirie, South Australia, the son of Gwendolyn (Burrows) and Robert Stigwood, an electrical engineer, and educated at Sacred Heart College in Adelaide. He began his working life as a copywriter for a local advertising agency and in 1955 moved to England. He had an eventful trip: in one incident recounted by Simon Napier-Bell, Stigwood bravely climbed fifty feet down a rope ladder into the hold of a tanker to administer morphine to a seaman who had fallen through a hatch. In Turkey he spent several months living with the family of a young friend in a hut in a small village and working with them in the fields.
Stigwood found a job in an institution for "backward teenage boys" in East Anglia after his arrival in England. He worked primarily on nightshifts, overseeing the dormitories and "preventing any flow of traffic after lights out", but found it an "unsympathetic and frustrating job" and left. He worked briefly for Hector Ross at the New Theatre Royal in Portsmouth, Hampshire, on the south coast before Ross left and the theatre closed. During this time he met the young Paul Jones who would later front the Manfred Mann pop group.
Not long after his period in Portsmouth, he met businessman Stephen Komlosy, who became a friend and his business partner forming Robert Stigwood Associates Ltd. The two men set up a small theatrical agency and built up a roster of actors. Among their clients was a young actor and singer called John Leyton, whose unexpected success as a recording artist made both Stigwood and his then associate Joe Meek into Britain's first independent record producers.
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