The EGOT — winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — is entertainment’s rarest round trip; fewer than two dozen people have ever completed it competitively. Elton John joined the list in January 2024, and the shape of his EGOT is unusual even within that tiny club: each award came from a different discipline, and the four wins span from 1987 to 2024.
The Four Pieces
| Award | First win | For |
|---|---|---|
| Grammy | 1987 | “That’s What Friends Are For” (Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group, with Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder). Four more competitive wins followed through 2001. |
| Oscar | 1995 | Best Original Song, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from The Lion King, written with Tim Rice. A second came in 2020 for “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” from Rocketman, written with Bernie Taupin. |
| Tony | 2000 | Best Original Score for Aida, again with Tim Rice. |
| Emmy | 2024 | Outstanding Variety Special (Live) for Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium — the broadcast of the final US shows. |
What the Spread Tells You
Plenty of EGOTs cluster around one project or one hot streak. This one doesn’t. The Grammy came from a charity pop single in the 1980s; the Oscar from a Disney animated film in the 1990s; the Tony from a Broadway score in 2000; the Emmy from a live television event in the 2020s built around a farewell tour. Four different rooms, four different collaborator sets, four different decades of taste to satisfy. That is less a trophy case than a longitudinal study in adaptability.
- The near-misses matter too: Billy Elliot the Musical earned him another Tony nomination for its score and won Best Musical in 2009.
- The honorary layer: a Grammy Legend Award (1999), the Kennedy Center Honors (2004), Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1994) and the Gershwin Prize shared with Bernie Taupin (2024) sit alongside the competitive wins.
- The state honours: knighted in 1998, Companion of Honour in 2020 — the British establishment’s two ways of saying the same thing twice.
The full honours record, along with the sales milestones and the philanthropy that arguably outweighs all of it, is on our Awards & Legacy page.
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