Trivia

Lambert's infatuation with Chinese-American silent movie star Anna May Wong led to the composition of his delicate "Eight Poems of Li-Po" (1927).

British composer and conductor, the son of Russian-born Australian painter George Washington Thomas Lambert. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1915 to 1922. He later co-founded the Vic Wells Company with Ninette de Valois (1931), and remained its leading conductor after it became the Sadler's Wells Ballet and the Royal Ballet, resigning in 1947. He then assumed the mantle of artistic director.

Generally agreed to be the basis of the character Moreland in Anthony Powell's series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time (1997)(made into a TV series in 1997).

Father of Kit Lambert. They died at the same age (45) and are buried together at Brompton Cemetery in London.

A heavy drinker for many years, he died of complications from diabetes that had gone not diagnosed.

Was a close friend of composer William Walton. In 1935, when Walton was stuck on the finale of his First Symphony, Lambert came to the rescue by suggesting he write a modern fugue. This advice worked and Walton's completed symphony was performed to great acclaim that year.

In the late 1930s he had an affair with rising ballet star Margot Fonteyn. Those who knew Fonteyn said that Lambert was the love of her life and she was devastated when he would not divorce his wife for her. Lambert's ballet "Horoscope" (1938), in which Fonteyn danced the female lead, was in part inspired by their relationship.

At age 20, Lambert was the youngest composer to receive a commission from famed ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, for "Romeo and Juliet" (1926). But he hated what he saw as the flippancy of the planned staging (among other things, the lovers escape together in an airplane). Lambert insisted on returning his fee and withdrawing the music, but Diaghilev put the score under police guard and the premiere went on as scheduled.

Named his son Kit Lambert after his late friend Christopher "Kit" Wood, an artist who committed suicide in 1930. Wood's oil painting of the composer (1926) now hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery.