Michael Ball

Michael Ashley Ball OBE (born 27 June 1962) is an English singer, presenter and actor. In 1985, he made his West End debut as Marius Pontmercy in the original production of Les Misérables. In 1989, he reached number two in the UK Singles Chart with "Love Changes Everything", from the musical Aspects of Love, where he played Alex Dillingham. He played the role in the West End and on Broadway. His album Coming Home To You reached number one in the UK making it his 4th number one album to date. On 24 April 2020, Ball and Captain Tom Moore entered the UK Singles Chart at number one with a cover of "You'll Never Walk Alone", with combined chart sales of 82,000 making it the fastest-selling single of 2020. In 1992, Ball represented the United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest, finishing second with the song "One Step Out of Time".

In 1995, he reprised his West End role of Marius in Les Misérables: The Dream Cast in Concert. His other West End credits include Raoul de Chagny in The Phantom of the Opera (1987), Giorgio Bachetti in Passion (1996), and Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (2002). In 2004, he played Jean Valjean in a concert performance of Les Misérables for the Queen at Windsor Castle. He has twice won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical. He won in 2008 for his role as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, and then in 2013 for the title role in the revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In 2018, he played Anatoly Sergievsky in the West End revival of Chess, and he returned to Les Misérables in 2019 and 2020 as Inspector Javert. He reprised his role of Edna Turnblad in the 2021 revival of Hairspray and in 2023 played the other leading male role of Sir George Dillingham in a revival of Aspects of Love. In 2024, Ball reprised the role of Javert in Les Misérables: The Arena Spectacular World Tour.

Ball was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2015 Birthday Honours for his services to musical theatre.

Ball was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, to a Welsh mother and an English father. His father Tony, who originally wanted to be an actor, trained as an Austin apprentice at the Longbridge plant and progressed to become head of global sales at British Leyland. He was awarded an MBE for services to industry. Ball's maternal grandfather was a coal miner. Ball has a brother, Kevin, four years his senior and a sister, Katherine, almost a decade his junior. He moved to Dartmoor with his parents when he was three years old. He has never had singing lessons, but as a boy he learned to sing by singing along to music, for example; songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson and Frank Sinatra. When he was 11 years old he went to Plymouth College, an independent boarding school, because his parents thought this would give him a good education. However this made him unhappy, as he did not fit into the academic and sporting environment at the school at that time. He did join his fellow junior boarders on Sunday morning at the Pathfinder bible group in St Andrew's church. One summer he went to Pathfinder camp on the isle of Jersey.

Ball was interested in the theatre and his father took him to see shows in the school holidays, including a Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre of King Lear, which impressed him as a youngster of about 14 years' age. He joined a youth theatre, which led to his studying drama at Guildford School of Acting, where he found an environment that suited him. As a student he went busking on Saturdays in Guildford town with a female student friend to earn a little extra money. He graduated in 1984. After his graduation, Ball's singing career rapidly got off the ground. His maternal grandmother, having a musical ear, was proud of Ball's early singing achievements; she died suddenly, however, of a heart attack about one week before his debut in The Pirates of Penzance.

In 1984, after he had left drama school, Ball's first part was in Godspell at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, after which he worked for a few months in rep in Basingstoke, but his first major break was a star part in the production of The Pirates of Penzance at Manchester Opera House; at an open audition he was selected from about 600 applicants who formed a queue to do singing, acting, and dancing interviews, which were held in three separate rooms. His next important role came when Cameron Mackintosh cast him as Marius in the original London cast of Les Misérables, but he caught glandular fever and he took six or seven weeks off sick to recover from the associated tonsillitis and post-viral fatigue. When he returned to work he was still suffering from fatigue, and began to get on-stage panic attacks — overwhelming anxiety, a rapid heartbeat, sweating, and problems with vision. These also started happening at other times, such as when he was going to work. For most of the next nine months he lived alone in his flat feeling depressed; he did not seek therapy and left Les Misérables.

Thames Television invited Ball to sing during the Miss England contest, a live televised event, and he sang well enough despite suffering from anxiety. When he viewed a recording later, he realised that no one would have noticed how nervous he was, and he became less worried about his anxiety problem. At about that time, Cameron Mackintosh asked Ball to play Raoul in the second casting of The Phantom of the Opera in London, which was necessary after Michael Crawford (who played the Phantom) and Steve Barton (who played Raoul) left the London show to appear in the Broadway staging in New York City. Mackintosh thought that Ball would not be under too much pressure as Raoul, and that the part was right for him.

Ball played Alex in Aspects of Love, both in London and New York, and Giorgio in the London production of Stephen Sondheim's Passion. Alone Together was his one-man show first performed at the Donmar Warehouse (which was reprised in 2004 for the Singular Sensations season at the Haymarket). In 1998 Ball performed at three big concerts: The Fiftieth Birthday Concert of Andrew Lloyd Webber at the Royal Albert Hall (released on DVD), Sondheim Tonight at the Barbican Centre (released on CD) and Hey, Mr. Producer: The Musical World of Cameron Mackintosh (released on CD and DVD). In 2002 he took on the role of Caractacus Potts in the Sherman Brothers musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was largely considered his comeback role.^{[citation needed]}