Elton John

With more than 300 million records sold worldwide, Sir Elton Hercules John is among the best-selling music artists of all time. Born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947 in Pinner, he built a six-decade career around piano-led pop and rock, theatrical performance, and a long-running songwriting partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin. John’s fashion and stage show became as closely identified with his public image as songs such as “Your Song,” “Rocket Man,” “Crocodile Rock,” “I’m Still Standing,” and “Candle in the Wind.”

John learned piano early and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. During the 1960s he formed the blues band Bluesology, worked as a session musician, and wrote for other performers with Taupin before issuing his debut album, Empty Sky, in 1969. His subsequent run included Honky Château (1972), Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973), and Rock of the Westies (1975), followed by later albums including Sleeping with the Past (1989), The One (1992), Songs from the West Coast (2001), The Diving Board (2013), and The Lockdown Sessions (2021).

His commercial record includes nine number-one singles in both the UK and the United States, along with seven consecutive number-one albums on the US Billboard 200. He was the first solo artist to score UK top 10 singles across six decades, and is the most successful solo artist in the history of the US Billboard charts. “Candle in the Wind 1997,” his revised tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, became the best-selling chart single of all time.

John also composed for screen and stage, including music for The Lion King in 1994, Aida in 2000, and Billy Elliot the Musical in 2005. His life and career were dramatized in the 2019 biographical film Rocketman. Farewell Yellow Brick Road, his final tour, ran from 2018 to 2023 and became the highest-grossing tour ever at the time.

An EGOT winner, John has received five Grammy Awards, two Academy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors. He has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of The Ivors Academy. He was knighted in 1998 for services to music and charity and appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2020.

Since the late 1980s, John has raised funds for HIV/AIDS causes. He founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992, which has raised more than £300 million, and began hosting its annual Academy Awards Party the following year. He chaired Watford Football Club from 1976 to 1987 and again from 1997 to 2002, later becoming its honorary life president. John entered a civil partnership with filmmaker David Furnish in 2005; they married in 2014.