Rob Guest

Rob Guest was an accomplished British-born theater actor from New Zealand who rose to fame in the 1990s with a series of major roles in prominent Australian theater productions, most notably Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera. Born Robert John Guest on July 17, 1950, in Birmingham, England, he moved to New Zealand with his family at age 13 and attended school in Auckland. His performance career as a theater actor took flight in the early '70s. He also established himself as a capable pop singer and television actor around this time, though his theater work proved considerably more successful. During the early to mid-'80s he worked in the United States, mostly casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno, and Lake Tahoe, before returning to New Zealand toward the end of the decade. In the late '80s he was cast as Jean Valjean in a touring Australian production of Les Misérables and performed the role for a few years. He was subsequently cast as the Phantom in the Australian production of The Phantom of the Opera. Between December 1991 and September 1998, he performed the Phantom role a world-record 2,289 times. Subsequent high-profile roles included Al Jolson in Jolson, Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, Rev. Shaw Moore in Footloose, Harold Hill in The Music Man, and the Wizard of Oz in Wicked. On September 30, 2008, he suffered a stroke and died a few days later on October 2, 2008, in Melbourne, Australia, at age 58.
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