I. SARAH'S EARLY YEARS: 1960 - 1981

Sarah Brightman was born an entertainer. From the tender age of three, she was dancing at festivals in her hometown of Berkhamsted, a sleepy market town outside of London. By age five, she was performing up to four routines and winning them all.

It was her ballet teacher, an examiner for the Royal Academy of Ballet, who made her parents aware that Sarah was unusually gifted. As such, Sarah’s show business aspirations were regarded not as childhood fantasy, but as precocious ambition, deserving of regard and nurture.

Despite severe bouts of homesickness, she enrolled in a performing arts boarding school at age eleven and was well on the way to furthering her dreams at that pre-pubescent age.

As a child, Sarah was exposed to an eclectic assortment of music, for hers was a household where Tom Jones and Tchaikovsky got equal billing and airtime. Sarah was just as happy twirling around in the kitchen to psychedelic pop as she was executing ballet maneuvers to serious classical movements.

It is perhaps not surprising that decades later, Sarah Brightman would break musical ground by fusing seemingly incongruous genres; gliding seamlessly between pop and classical, dance and trip-hop, Gregorian chants and Eastern refrains. Even her gravitation towards Gregorian chants can be traced back to her years of singing in Berkhamsted's church choir.

Tuneful choir voice notwithstanding, the assumption by all concerned had been that Sarah would be a professional dancer. But it was not until Sarah's performance at the age of twelve at her boarding school that her singing aspirations truly took root.

Paula, her mother, recalls:
I really didn’t know how good her voice was until I saw her sing at an end of term concert. She stood up on stage, with braces and all, and sang something from “Alice in Wonderland.” It was so beautiful, I felt sick. She hit such high notes that the audience was stunned. They completely fell for her. It was absolute magic, and obvious, from that moment on, that singing would be her calling.

With Sarah's obvious gift for singing, acting and dancing, it didn’t take very long for her to catch the attention of school officials. After just a year there, she was sent out to the Piccadilly Theatre to audition for I and Albert, a new John Schlesinger musical.

Sarah clinched two roles -- that of Vicky, Queen Victoria’s eldest child, and a street waif -- and was ecstatic. After all, a major role in a West End production helmed by a famous director was hardly an everyday occurrence for a twelve-year old. I and Albert effectively extinguished her interest in academics, injecting in her a voracious, lifelong craving for the stage.

In the succeeding years, the teenage Sarah spent her summers modeling and strutting around on catwalks, draped in garb that ran the gamut from cheap to chic -- Woolworth jeans one day, Dior haute couture and Vogue photo sessions the next.

At the age of sixteen, she landed a coveted spot in Pan's People. As the resident dance troupe of BBC Television’s top-rated hit-parade show, Top of the Pops, this all-girl group ruled the airwaves, attracting a rabid and devoted following. Even though BBC's new lineup meant that Pan's People would no longer grace the hit show, nothing could be more glamorous to a dancer than becoming a Pan’s Person.

Induction into the group required, however, that Sarah drop out of school, which was precisely what she did, despite pronounced parental trepidation. No one could have predicted then that this risky move would, in time, pay off so handsomely for Sarah and her legions of fans.

Before long, Sarah was spotted by choreographer Arlene Phillips (who would later go on to choreograph hits like Annie, Starlight Express and Lord of the Dance) and was invited to audition for Hot Gossip, the sultry dance troupe with a weekly slot on Thames Television’s Kenny Everett Show. Arlene was looking for new recruits with the sex appeal and risqué moves necessary to complement the show’s irreverent, no-holds barred format. So raunchy were the routines that they actually incurred the wrath of morality watchdog groups.

But distracting as the furor surrounding the troupe’s come-hither titillation may have been, it could not detract from the fact that Hot Gossip pioneered cutting-edge dance moves and quick edits, spawning routines and techniques that are still very much a staple in choreography today.

In the meantime, Sarah had been recording demo tracks on her own, one of which caught the attention of a producer at Hansa Ariola, a label handling disco artists like Donna Summer and Boney M. He was looking for the right voice for Jeffrey Calvert's “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.”

It was a track laden with every conceivable space exploration cliché in the book but was, nonetheless, perfect for appeasing the late-seventies appetite for mylar and flying saucers. Sarah was quickly signed on. (Jeffrey Calvert and Sarah would eventually form their own label, Whisper, and release two singles together, "My Boyfriend's Back" and "Not Having That").

“Starship Trooper” was released in December 1978, and became an instant hit, selling half a million copies and reaching number six on the British Hit Parade. It was exhilarating for Sarah, who had always been a chart-watcher, to observe her own meteoric rise.Sexy, radical and hip, "Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip" became a phenomenon, and the teen idols were soon endorsing clothes, shoes, hair products and the like. Royalties started pouring in and at eighteen, Sarah commenced the life of a pop star.

It was during this heady time that Sarah first met Andrew One (who is not to be confused with Andrew Two, that impossibly successful musical theatre impresario). After a quick courtship, Sarah married Andrew Graham Stewart. Seven years her senior, Andrew was the manager of Tangerine Dreams, a German psychedelic rock band signed to Virgin.

Eventually, Sarah left Hot Gossip and auditioned for a role in a new musical, one with a decidedly curious theme: Cats. It was also where she would meet Andrew Number Two...

II. SARAH'S MUSICAL THEATRE ERA: 1981-1990