100 Greatest Movie Composers
This list is a list of best film composers chosen based on composition, originality, variation, variety, quantity and success in the film score business.
List activity
12K views
• 17 this weekCreate a new list
List your movie, TV & celebrity picks.
100 people
- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
As one of the best known, awarded, and financially successful composers in US history, John Williams is as easy to recall as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein, illustrating why he is "America's composer" time and again. With a massive list of awards that includes over 52 Oscar nominations (five wins), twenty-odd Gold and Platinum Records, and a slew of Emmy (two wins), Golden Globe (three wins), Grammy (25 wins), National Board of Review (including a Career Achievement Award), Saturn (six wins), American Film Institute (including a Lifetime Achievement Award) and BAFTA (seven wins) citations, along with honorary doctorate degrees numbering in the teens, Williams is undoubtedly one of the most respected composers for Cinema. He's led countless national and international orchestras, most notably as the nineteenth conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980-1993, helming three Pops tours of the US and Japan during his tenure. He currently serves as the Pop's Conductor Laureate. Also to his credit is a parallel career as an author of serious, and some not-so-serious, concert works - performed by the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich, André Previn, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gil Shaham, Leonard Slatkin, James Ingram, Dale Clevenger, and Joshua Bell. Of particular interests are his Essay for Strings, a jazzy Prelude & Fugue, the multimedia presentation American Journey (aka The Unfinished Journey (1999)), a Sinfonietta for Winds, a song cycle featuring poems by Rita Dove, concerti for flute, violin, clarinet, trumpet, tuba, cello, bassoon and horn, fanfares for the 1984, 1988 and 1996 Summer Olympics, the 2002 Winter Olympics, and a song co-written with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman for the Special Olympics! But such a list probably warrants a more detailed background...
Born in Flushing, New York on February 8, 1932, John Towner Williams discovered music almost immediately, due in no small measure to being the son of a percussionist for CBS Radio and the Raymond Scott Quintet. After moving to Los Angeles in 1948, the young pianist and leader of his own jazz band started experimenting with arranging tunes; at age 15, he determined he was going to become a concert pianist; at 19, he premiered his first original composition, a piano sonata.
He attended both UCLA and the Los Angeles City College, studying orchestration under MGM musical associate Robert Van Eps and being privately tutored by composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, until conducting for the first time during three years with the U.S. Air Force. His return to the states brought him to Julliard, where renowned piano pedagogue Madame Rosina Lhevinne helped Williams hone his performance skills. He played in jazz clubs to pay his way; still, she encouraged him to focus on composing. So it was back to L.A., with the future maestro ready to break into the Hollywood scene.
Williams found work with the Hollywood studios as a piano player, eventually accompanying such fare such as the TV series Peter Gunn (1958), South Pacific (1958), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as well as forming a surprising friendship with Bernard Herrmann. At age 24, "Johnny Williams" became a staff arranger at Columbia and then at 20th Century-Fox, orchestrating for Alfred Newman and Lionel Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and other Golden Age notables. In the field of popular music, he performed and arranged for the likes of Vic Damone, Doris Day, and Mahalia Jackson... all while courting actress/singer Barbara Ruick, who became his wife until her death in 1974. John & Barbara had three children; their daughter is now a doctor, and their two sons, Joseph Williams and Mark Towner Williams, are rock musicians.
The orchestrating gigs led to serious composing jobs for television, notably Alcoa Premiere (1961), Checkmate (1960), Gilligan's Island (1964), Lost in Space (1965), Land of the Giants (1968), and his Emmy-winning scores for Heidi (1968) and Jane Eyre (1970). Daddy-O (1958) and Because They're Young (1960) brought his original music to the big theatres, but he was soon typecast doing comedies. His efforts in the genre helped guarantee his work on William Wyler's How to Steal a Million (1966), however, a major picture that immediately led to larger projects. Of course, his arrangements continued to garner attention, and he won his first Oscar for adapting Fiddler on the Roof (1971).
During the '70s, he was King of Disaster Scores with The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974) and The Towering Inferno (1974). His psychological score for Images (1972) remains one of the most innovative works in soundtrack history. But his Americana - particularly The Reivers (1969) - is what caught the ear of director Steven Spielberg, then preparing for his first feature, The Sugarland Express (1974). When Spielberg reunited with Williams on Jaws (1975), they established themselves as a blockbuster team, the composer gained his first Academy Award for Original Score, and Spielberg promptly recommended Williams to a friend, George Lucas. In 1977, John Williams re-popularized the epic cinema sound of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman and other composers from the Hollywood Golden Age: Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) became the best selling score-only soundtrack of all time, and spawned countless musical imitators. For the next five years, though the music in Hollywood changed, John Williams wrote big, brassy scores for big, brassy films - The Fury (1978), Superman (1978), 1941 (1979), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) ... An experiment during this period, Heartbeeps (1981), flopped. There was a long-term change of pace, nonetheless, as Williams fell in love with an interior designer and married once more.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) brought about his third Oscar, and The River (1984), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Accidental Tourist (1988) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) added variety to the 1980s, as he returned to television with work on Amazing Stories (1985) and themes for NBC, including NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (1970). The '80s also brought the only exceptions to the composer's collaboration with Steven Spielberg - others scored both Spielberg's segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and The Color Purple (1985).
Intending to retire, the composer's output became sporadic during the 1990s, particularly after the exciting Jurassic Park (1993) and the masterful, Oscar-winning Schindler's List (1993). This lighter workload, coupled with a number of hilarious references on The Simpsons (1989) actually seemed to renew interest in his music. Two Home Alone films (1990, 1992), JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), Sleepers (1996), Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Angela's Ashes (1999), and a return to familiar territory with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) recalled his creative diversity of the '70s.
In this millennium, the artist shows no interest in slowing down. His relationships with Spielberg and Lucas continue in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), the remaining Star Wars prequels (2002, 2005), Minority Report (2002), Catch Me If You Can (2002), and a promised fourth Indiana Jones film. There is a more focused effort on concert works, as well, including a theme for the new Walt Disney Concert Hall and a rumored light opera. But one certain highlight is his musical magic for the world of Harry Potter (2001, 2002, 2004, etc.), which he also arranged into a concert suite geared toward teaching children about the symphony orchestra. His music remains on the whistling lips of people around the globe, in the concert halls, on the promenades, in album collections, sports arenas, and parades, and, this writer hopes, touching some place in ourselves. So keep those ears ready wherever you go, 'cause you will likely hear a bit of John Williams on your way.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
The man behind the low woodwinds that open Citizen Kane (1941), the shrieking violins of Psycho (1960), and the plaintive saxophone of Taxi Driver (1976) was one of the most original and distinctive composers ever to work in film. He started early, winning a composition prize at the age of 13 and founding his own orchestra at the age of 20. After writing scores for Orson Welles's radio shows in the 1930s (including the notorious 1938 "The War of the Worlds" broadcast), he was the obvious choice to score Welles's film debut, Citizen Kane (1941), and, subsequently, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), although he removed his name from the latter after additional music was added without his (or Welles's) consent when the film was mutilated by a panic-stricken studio. Herrmann was a prolific film composer, producing some of his most memorable work for Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he wrote nine scores. A notorious perfectionist and demanding (he once said that most directors didn't have a clue about music, and he blithely ignored their instructions--like Hitchcock's suggestion that Psycho (1960) have a jazz score and no music in the shower scene). He ended his partnership with Hitchcock after the latter rejected his score for Torn Curtain (1966) on studio advice. He was also an early experimenter in the sounds used in film scores, most famously The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), scored for two theremins, pianos, and a horn section; and was a consultant on the electronic sounds created by Oskar Sala on the mixtrautonium for The Birds (1963). His last score was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and died just hours after recording it. He also wrote an opera, "Wuthering Heights", and a cantata, "Moby Dick".- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Franz Waxman (Wachsmann) pursued his dream of a career in music despite his family's misgivings. He worked for several years as a bank teller and paid for piano, harmony and composition lessons with his salary. He later moved to Berlin, where he continued his study and progress as a musician. He was able to support himself by playing and arranging for a popular German jazz band, Weintraub Syncopaters, in the late 1920s. Friedrich Hollaender, who had written some music for the Weintraubs, gave Waxman his first chance to move into movie scoring by hiring him to orchestrate and conduct Hollander's score (an arrangement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) for the film that launched Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg. During 1932 Waxman, a Jew, joined many other Jews leaving Germany as the Nazi vise closed irrevocably on free society. He continued working with Germanfilm makers in France. Waxman did musical arranging and co-scoring, usually with Allan Gray, for approximately 15 European movies (his first independent score was in 1932). "The Blue Angel" producer Erich Pommer liked Waxman's work and offered him the composing job for Liliom (1934), directed by Fritz Lang in France.
Pommer decided to do Music in the Air (1934), a Jerome Kern musical, which meant going to Hollywood. Waxman was asked to come along to do the arranging. Needing no further reason to remain in Europe as the Nazi clouds darkened over it, Waxman began a new chapter in Hollywood film music history. He fortunately had some spare time to study with 'Arnold Schoenberg' after coming to Los Angeles, but he was soon talking to another new arrival, English director James Whale, about scoring Bride of Frankenstein (1935) for Universal. Waxman gave Whale what he wanted--an unusual score to fit the quirky, somewhat over-the-top content of the film (in fact, some of this score was later used in other films). As Waxman worked for Universal through the 1930s, he found himself in assembly-line mode, sometimes sharing scoring credit, and doing a lot of arranging stock music, which was usually used for the studio's many serials. This cranked up Waxman's yearly film output to around 20 or so through 1940.
By 1940, however, he was composing original music scores for other studios, beginning with the romantic music for Selznick Studios' Rebecca (1940)--the first Hollywood film for Alfred Hitchcock--and whimsical fare for MGM's The Philadelphia Story (1940). In 1941 he was doing more work for MGM with Honky Tonk (1941) and his second Hitchcock score, Suspicion (1941) from RKO. By 1943 and for the rest of the decade Waxman was usually scoring for Warner Bros., starting with Destination Tokyo (1943) and including music for some of that studio's classics of the period, such as To Have and Have Not (1944) with Humphrey Bogart. Through the decade he was nominated for an Oscar seven times for Best Film Score.
Waxman moved on to Paramount through the first half of the 1950s and garnered his two Oscars in back--to-back wins for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951). This recognition finally underscored what was at the heart of all of Waxman's music: seriously focused attention on relaying a film's story through the content of the music. He would continue his scoring work for several studios into the 1960s, with three more nominations. Some of his music in the 1950s was recycled from his previous scores, as in the case of his third assignment for Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954) which contained used music. Waxman was also active in contemporary classical music. In 1947 he founded the Los Angeles International Music Festival and, as Music Director and Conductor, brought the premieres of works by world renowned contemporary composers to the Los Angeles cultural scene. Among his own output of such music was his popular "Carmen Fantasy" for violin and orchestra. Waxman also composed for TV's Gunsmoke (1955), The Fugitive (1963), Peyton Place (1964) (he had composed the music for the film the series was based on, Peyton Place (1957)) and others. Waxman died relatively young, but because of his steady output, only fellow emigrant Max Steiner (who was nearly 20 years older and whose output entailed more than 200 arrangements of stock music, rather than original scores) was a more prolific early Hollywood composer.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Austrian composer Max Steiner achieved legendary status as the creator of hundreds of classic American film scores. He was born Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner in Vienna, Austria, the son of Marie Mizzi (Hasiba) and Gabor Steiner, an impresario, and the grandson of actor and theater director and manager Maximilian Steiner. His family was Jewish. As a child, he was astonishingly musically gifted, composing complex works as a teenager and completing the course of study at Vienna's Hochschule fuer Musik und Darstellende Kunst in only one year, at the age of sixteen. He studied under Gustav Mahler and, before the age of twenty, made his living as a conductor and as composer of works for the theater, the concert hall, and vaudeville. After a brief sojourn in Britian, Steiner moved to the USA in the same wave as fellow film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold and quickly became a sought-after orchestrator and conductor on Broadway, bringing the Western classical tradition in which he had been raised to mainstream audiences.
He was soon snatched up by the film studios with the advent of sound and helped the fledgling talkies become musically sophisticated within a brief few years. He was one of the first to fully integrate the musical score with the images on-screen and to score individual scenes for their content and create leitmotifs for individual characters, as opposed to simply providing vaguely appropriate mood music, as evidenced in King Kong (1933), which set the standard for American film music for years to come.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, he was one of the most respected, innovative, and brilliant composers of American film music, creating a truly staggering number of exceptional scores for films of all types. He was nominated for Academy Awards for his scores eighteen times and won three times. Years after his death in 1971, he remains one of the giants of motion picture history, and his music still thrives.- Music Department
- Composer
- Additional Crew
Elmer Bernstein was educated at the Walden School and New York University. He served in the US Army Air Corps in World War II, writing scores for the service radio unit. He also wrote and arranged musical numbers for Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band. A prolific and respected film music composer, he was a protégé of Aaron Copland, who studied music with Roger Sessions and Stefan Wolpe. Bernstein worked in various artistic endeavors, including painting and the theatre and also performed as an actor and dancer. Among his early composition work were scores for United Nations radio programs and television and industrial documentaries. His original scores for films range over an enormous variety of styles, with his groundbreaking jazz score for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), light musical comedies such as his Oscar-winning Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) score, and perhaps his most familiar score, for the western The Magnificent Seven (1960). Between 1963 and 1969, Bernstein served as vice president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
A few years before before his death, he acquired something of a cult status among fans of English football when his familiar main theme for The Great Escape (1963) was adopted by them and hummed and played, lustily, during matches.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
A child prodigy, Miklos Rózsa learned to play the violin at the age of five and read music before he was able to read words. In 1926, he began studying at the Leipzig Conservatory where he was considered a brilliant student. He obtained his doctorate in music in 1930. Moving to Paris the following year, Rózsa had much of his own chamber music performed, as well as his 'Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song' and his 'Symphony and Serenade for Small Orchestra'. However, he soon became disenchanted with meagre wages for playing classical music in concert. Attempting to change his financial situation, Rózsa managed to secure a contract with Pathe records to compose music for use in intermissions between movies. This was to be his first step in entering the more lucrative field of film composition. In 1935, Rózsa went to London after being invited by the Hungarian Legation to write the music for a ballet. The resulting work, 'Hungaria', so impressed the director Jacques Feyder that he set up a meeting with fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda, who then commissioned him to write an opulent score for the romantic drama Knight Without Armor (1937). Rózsa later recalled having to learn to write music for films 'the hard way': "I bought one German and one Russian book on the technique of film music and everything I learned from these books was absolutely wrong! But then I had long conferences with Muir Mathieson, who was the music director and conductor for Korda, and somehow I learned."
While writing the score for The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Rózsa relocated to Hollywood where he remained gainfully employed over the next four decades. An expert at orchestration and counterpoint with a great flair for the dramatic, he often concentrated on the psychological aspects of a film. One of his innovations was the use of a theremin for the famous dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) which accompanies Salvador Dalí's transcendental nightmare images. Few composers have managed to convey suspense and tension as powerfully as Rózsa with his eerily haunting scores for some of the Golden Era's best films noir (Double Indemnity (1944), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), The Killers (1946), The Naked City (1948)) or his lush, stirring music for spectacular epics (Quo Vadis (1951), Ivanhoe (1952), El Cid (1961)). In addition to winning three Oscars for his film work, Rózsa also continued as a prolific composer of classical music, including Violin and Piano Concertos, a Concerto for String Orchestra, a Sinfonia Concertante and Notturno Ungherese (influenced, respectively, by Stravinsky and Bartók). In 1945, he was appointed Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California where also lectured on the subject for many years.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Alfred Newman is an American composer, arranger, and conductor of film music.
From his start as a music prodigy, he came to be regarded as a respected figure in the history of film music. He won nine Academy Awards and was nominated 45 times, contributing to the Newmans being the most nominated Academy Award extended family, with a collective 92 nominations in various music categories.
In a career spanning more than four decades, Newman composed the scores for over 200 motion pictures. Some of his most famous scores include All About Eve (1950), Anastasia (1956), Wuthering Heights (1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Song of Bernadette (1943), Captain from Castile (1947), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), How the West Was Won (1962), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and his final score, Airport (1970), all of which were nominated for or won Academy Awards. He is perhaps best known for composing the fanfare which accompanies the studio logo at the beginning of 20th Century Fox's productions.
Newman was highly regarded as a conductor, and arranged and conducted many scores by other composers, including George Gershwin, Charles Chaplin, and Irving Berlin. He also conducted the music for many film adaptations of Broadway musicals (having worked on Broadway for ten years before coming to Hollywood), as well as many original Hollywood musicals.
He was among the first musicians to compose and conduct original music during Hollywood's Golden Age of movies, later becoming a respected and powerful music director in the history of Hollywood.- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Unlike many musicians who started to learn music while still in their childhood, Maurice Jarre was already late in his teens when he discovered music and decided to make a career in that field. Against his father's will, he enrolled at Conservatoire de Paris where he studied percussions, composition and harmonies. He also met and studied under Joseph Martenot, inventor of the Martenot Waves, an electronic keyboard that prefigured the modern synthesizer.
After leaving the Conservatoire, Jarre played percussion and Martenot Waves for a while at Jean-Louis Barrault's theater. In 1950, another actor-director, Jean Vilar , asked Jarre to score his production of Kleist's 'The Princess of Homburg', the first score Jarre wrote. Shortly after, Vilar created the 'Théâtre National Populaire' and hired Jarre as permanent composer, an association that lasted 12 years.
In 1951, filmmaker Georges Franju asked him to write the music of his 23 minutes documentary Hôtel des Invalides (1952), Jarre's first composition for the movie screen. His first full-length feature, again directed by Georges Franju, was Head Against the Wall (1959) followed by Franju's best known film, Eyes Without a Face (1960).
Jarre's career took a spectacular turn in 1961 when producer Sam Spiegel asked him to work on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Initially, three composers were supposed to write the score, but for various reasons, Jarre ended up writing all the music himself and won his first Oscar. His second collaboration with David Lean on Doctor Zhivago (1965) earned him another Oscar and obtained a level of success rarely achieved by a film score. He collaborated with Lean again on Ryan's Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984) for which he received a third Academy Award. He was set to score Lean's next movie, 'Nostromo', but the director became ill and died before the film could ever get made.
He also worked for directors as diverse as William Wyler (The Collector (1965)); John Huston (three films); Franco Zeffirelli (Jesus of Nazareth (1977)); Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum (1979) [The Tin Drum] and Circle of Deceit (1981) [Circle of Deceit]); Peter Weir (four films); Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist (1988)) and Alfonso Arau (A Walk in the Clouds (1995)).
Mainly perceived as a symphonist and known for his prominent use of percussions, Jarre often integrated ethnic instruments in his orchestrations like cithara on 'Lawrence of Arabia' or fujara (an old Slovak flute) on 'The Tin Drum'. During the eighties, he incorporated synthetic sounds in his music, writing his first entirely electronic score for The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). His son Jean-Michel Jarre is a well-known popular musician.- Music Department
- Composer
- Producer
Dimitri Tiomkin was a Russian Jewish composer who emigrated to America and became one of the most distinguished and best-loved music writers of Hollywood. He won a hallowed place in the pantheon of the most successful and productive composers in American film history, earning himself four Oscars and sixteen Academy Awards nominations. He was born Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin on May 10, 1894, in Kremenchug, Russia. His mother, Marie (nee Tartakovsky), was a Russian pianist and teacher. His father, Zinovi Tiomkin, was a renowned medical doctor. His uncle, rabbi Vladimir Tiomkin, was the first President of the World Zionist Union. Young Dimitri began his music studies under the tutelage of his mother. Then, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he studied piano under Felix Blumenfeld and Isabelle Vengerova. He also studied composition under the conservatory's director, Aleksandr Glazunov, who appreciated Tiomkin's talent and hired him as a piano tutor for his niece. Soon Dimitri appeared on Russian stages as a child pianist prodigy and continued to develop into a virtuoso pianist. Like other intellectuals in St. Petersburg, Tiomkin frequented the club near the Opera, called Stray Dog Café, where Russian celebrities, including directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nicolas Evreinoff, writers Boris Pasternak, Aleksei Tolstoy, Sergei Esenin, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev and Vladimir Mayakovsky, had their bohemian hangout. There Tiomlkin could be seen with his two friends, composer Sergei Prokofiev and choreographer Mikhail Fokin. At that time he also gained exposure and a keen interest in American music, including the works of Irving Berlin, ragtime, blues, and early jazz. Tiomkin started his music career as a piano accompanist for Russian and French silent films in movie houses of St. Petersburg. When the famous comedian Max Linder toured in Russia, he hired Tiomkin to play piano improvisations for the Max Linder Show, and their collaboration was successful. He also provided classical piano accompaniment for the famous ballerina Tamara Karsavina. However, the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia caused dramatic political and economic changes. From 1917 to 1921 Tiomkin was a Red Army staff composer, writing scores for revolutionary mass spectacles at the Palace Square involving 500 musicians and 8000 extras, such as "The Storming of the Winter Palace" staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Yevreinov for the third anniversary of the Communist Revolution. In 1921 Tiomkin emigrated from Russia and moved to Berlin to join his father, who was working with the famous German biochemist Paul Ehrlich. In Berlin Tiomkin had several study sessions with Ferruccio Busoni and his circle. By 1922 Dimitri was well known for his concert appearances in Germany, often with the Berlin Philharmonic. Among his repertoire were pieces written for him by other composers. He also concertized in France. There, in Paris, Feodor Chaliapin Sr. convinced Tiomkin to emigrate to the United States. In 1925 Tiomkin got his first gig in New York: he became the main pianist for a Broadway dance studio. There he met and soon married the principal dancer/choreographer, Albertina Rasch. He also met composers George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern. In 1928 Tiomkin made a concert tour of Europe, introducing the works of Gershwin to audiences there. He gave the French premiere of Gershwin's "Piano Concerto in F" at the famed "L'Opera de Paris." His Hollywood debut came in 1929, when MGM offered him a contract to score music for five films. His wife got a position as an assistant choreographer for some musical films. He also scored a Universal Pictures film, performed concerts in New York City and continued composing ballet music for his wife's dance work. He also continued writing American popular music and songs. He received further Broadway exposure with the Shuberts and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.. He produced his own play "Keeping Expenses Down," but it was a flop amidst the gloom of the Big Depression, and he once again returned to Hollywood in 1933. When he came back he was on his own. By that time Tiomkin was disillusioned with the intrigue and politics inside the Hollywood studio system. He already knew the true value of his musical talent, and chose to freelance with the studios rather than accepting a multi-picture contract. He became something of a crusader, pushing for better pay and residuals. His independent personality was reflected in his music and business life: he was never under a long-term studio contract. Though MGM was the first to be acquainted with his services, Tiomkin next turned to Paramount for Alice in Wonderland (1933), another fine example of making music that he liked. Hollywood's most prominent independent composer, Tiomkin, thanks to his free-agent status, negotiated contractual terms to his benefit, which in turn benefited other musicians. He aggressively sought music publishing rights and formed his own ASCAP music publishing company, Volta Music Corporation, while remaining faithful to France-based performing rights organization SACEM. In Tiomkin's own words: "My fight is for dignity. Not only for composer, but for all artists responsible for picture." He also fought for employing qualified musicians regardless of their race. As a composer classically trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Tiomkin was highly skilled in orchestral arrangements with complex brass and strings, but he was also thoroughly versed in the musical subtleties of America and integrated it into traditional European forms. His interest in the musical form resulted in his next score, for the operetta Naughty Marietta (1935), a popular musical that teamed Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. He also did his fair share of stock music arranging. Among his most successful partnerships was that with director Frank Capra, starting with Lost Horizon (1937), where Tiomkin used many innovative ideas, and received his first Academy Award nomination. The association with Capra lasted through four more famous films, culminating with It's a Wonderful Life (1946). In 1937 Tiomkin became a naturalized American citizen. The next year he made his public conducting debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. During the WWII years he wrote music for 12 military documentaries, earning himself a special decoration from the US Department of Defense. After the war he ventured into all styles of music for movies, ranging from mystery and horror to adventure and drama, such as his enchanting score, intricately worked around Claude Debussy's "Girl with the Flaxen Hair," for the haunting Portrait of Jennie (1948) and the energetic martial themes for Cyrano de Bergerac (1950). He scored three films for Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps the most inventive being for the tension-building Strangers on a Train (1951) with its out-of-control carousel finale. He also worked with top directors in that exclusively American genre: the western. His loudest success was the original music for Duel in the Sun (1946) by King Vidor. For that film, Tiomkin wrote a lush orchestral score, trying to fulfill writer/producer David O. Selznick's request to "Make a theme for orgasm!" Tiomkin worked for several weeks, and composed a powerful theme culminating with 40 drummers. Selsnick was impressed, but commented: "This is not orgasm!" Tiomkin worked for one more month and delivered an even more powerful theme culminating with 100 voices. Selznick was impressed again, but commented: "This is not orgasm! This is not the way I f..k!" Tiomkin replied brilliantly, "Mister Selznick, you may f..k the way you want, but this is the way I f..k!" Selznick was convinced, and after that Tiomkin's music was fully accepted. In 1948 he wrote the score for one of the westerns with John Wayne, Red River (1948) by Howard Hawks. Wayne had Tiomkin's touch on five more movies into the 1960s. Tiomkin was adding a song to all of his scores, starting with the obscure Trail to Mexico (1946). The result was successful, and the western score with songs became Tiomkin's signature. Horns and lush string orchestral sound are most associated with Tiomkin's style, which culminated in The Unforgiven (1960) by John Huston, although he used the same approach in High Noon (1952) with the famous song "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'" and Howard Hawks' The Big Sky (1952). Most of his big-screen songs were written for westerns and totaled some 25 themes. The most songs he composed for one movie was six for Friendly Persuasion (1956). Tiomkin achieved dramatic effects by using his signature orchestral arrangements in such famous films as Giant (1956), The Old Man and the Sea (1958) and The Guns of Navarone (1961). He also wrote music and theme songs for several TV series, most notably for Clint Eastwood's Rawhide (1959). In 1967 his beloved wife, Albertina Rasch, passed away, and Tiomkin was emotionally devastated. Going back from his wife's funeral to his Hancock Park home in Los Angeles, he was attacked and beaten by a street gang. The crime caused him more pain, so upon recommendation of his doctor, Tiomkin moved to Europe for the rest of his life. In the 1960s Tiomkin produced Mackenna's Gold (1969) starring Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif. He also executive-produced and orchestrated the US/Russian co-production Tchaikovsky (1970), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for best music, and the movie was also nominated in the foreign language film category. Filming on locations in Russia allowed him to return to his homeland for the first time since 1921, which also was the last visit to his mother country. In 1972 Tiomkin married Olivia Cynthia Patch, a British aristocrat, and the couple settled in London. They also maintained a second home in Paris. For the rest of his life Tiomkin indulged himself in playing piano, a joy also shared by his wife. He died on November 11, 1979, in London, England, and was laid to rest in Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Glendale, California. In 1999 Dimitri Tiomkin was pictured on one of six 33¢ USA commemorative postage stamps in the Legends of American Music series, honoring Hollywood Composers. His music remains popular, and is continuously used in many new films, such as Inglourious Basterds (2009) by director Quentin Tarantino.- Composer
- Music Department
- Writer
Of Scottish and German ancestry, Herbert Stothart was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1885. At first, he was slated for a career as a teacher of history. However, he became enamored with music while singing in a school choir, and again, later, while attending the University of Wisconsin. There, he composed and conducted musicals for the Haresfoot Dramatic Club (the actor Otis Skinner was a noted alumnus). The success of one of these amateur productions, "Manicure Shop", which was staged professionally in Chicago, led to further musical studies in Europe, followed by full-time work as a composer for vaudeville and musical theatre.
In 1914, Stothart was hired by legendary lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II as musical director for the Rudolf Friml operetta "High Jinks". After three years on the road with various shows, Stothart scored his first Broadway musical, the farce "Furs and Frills", in October 1917. During the next decade, he continued a string of successful collaborations with top-flight composers, lyricists and playwrights, including Otto A. Harbach and Vincent Youmans. After 1922, Stothart's own original compositions began to be featured, and, within two years, he was able to celebrate his first major hit with the musical "Rose-Marie". "Rose-Marie" was written in conjunction with Rudolf Friml and ran for an impressive 557 performances at the Imperial Theatre. Stothart followed this success with the opera/ballet "Song of the Flame", co-written with George Gershwin. In 1929, the success of 'talking pictures', combined with the popularity of musicals, prompted studio boss Louis B. Mayer to lure Stothart to Hollywood.
Within just a few years, Stothart established himself as MGM's foremost film composer, working exclusively on the studio's prestige output. Many of his scores were for productions derived from literary classics, such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Good Earth (1937) and Pride and Prejudice (1940). Stothart's preferred musical style was subtle and melodic, sometimes mournful, often prominently featuring violins. He was prone to use leitmotifs from classical composers, for example in A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) (Chopin), or Conquest (1937) and Waterloo Bridge (1940) (Tchaikovsky). In his dual capacity as musical director, Stothart also supervised or orchestrated almost all of the popular Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald operettas. He composed a number of songs, one of the best-known being the 'Donkey Serenade', sung by Allan Jones in The Firefly (1937). Most importantly, perhaps, he became the first composer at MGM to win an Academy Award for a musical score for The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Herbert Stothart spent his entire Hollywood career at MGM. In 1947, he suffered a heart attack while visiting Scotland, and, afterwards, composed an orchestral piece ('Heart Attack: A Symphonic Poem'), based on his tribulations. He worked on another ('The Voice of Liberation'), when he died two years later at the age of 63 from cancer of the spine. He is an inductee in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.- Music Department
- Producer
- Composer
Considered to be one of the greatest minds in music and television history, Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. was born on March 14, 1933 in Chicago, Illinois. He is the son of Sarah Frances (Wells), a bank executive, and Quincy Delight Jones, Sr., a carpenter.
Jones found his love for music while he was enrolled in grade school at Seattle's Garfield High School, this is also where he had met Ray Charles whom he later worked and became friends with. In 1951, Quincy Jones had won a scholarship to the Berklee College Of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Jones however dropped out when he got the opportunity to tour with Lionel Hampton's band as a trumpeter and conductor. Jones also worked for the European production of Harold Arlen's blues opera, Free and Easy in 1959. After Jones had worked on several projects overseas he returned to New York where he composed and arranged, and recorded for artists such as Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, LeVern Baker, and Big Maybell. Jones was working with these artists while holding an executive position at Mercury Records, being one of the very few African Americans at the time to have such a position.
In 1963, Quincy Jones won his first Grammy award for his Count Basie arrangement of "I Can't Stop Loving You". In 1964, by the request of director Sidney Lumet, Jones composed the music for his movie, The Pawnbroker. This would be the first of many Jones composed for film scores. By the mid-1960's Quincy Jones became the conductor and arranger for Frank Sinatra's orchestra. Jones also conducted and arranged one of Sinatra's most memorable songs, Fly Me To The Moon. Jones appeared on a lot of film credits for his music such as The Slender Thread, Walk, Don't Run, In Cold Blood, In The Heat Of The Night, A Dandy In Aspic, Mackenna's Gold, and The Italian Job. In 1972 Quincy Jones was the theme song composer for the hit-sitcom, Sanford And Son.
Quincy Jones in 1978 worked on music for the Wiz, this is where he met icon, Michael Jackson. Jackson at the time was looking for a producer, Jones recommended some producers but in the end asked Jackson if he could do it, Jackson said yes. In 1982 as a result of this partnership, Jones had formed a tapestry with Jackson which was unbreakable it was called, Thriller. The Thriller album sold more than 100 million records world-wide. Jones continued working with Jackson with his Bad album in 1987. However after Jones recommended Jackson seek other producers to update his music. Jones referred Jackson to producer, Teddy Riley. This ended a partnership between two-greats, Jackson and Jones would never collaborate again.
In 1981 Jones had an album called, The Dude. In 1985 Jones scored the film adaptation of The Color Purple. Jones also was a philanthropist, in 1985 gathering multiple stars to participate in the song We Are The World to help raise money to help the victims of the Ethopian disaster.
In 1990 Jones composed a theme song for the new sitcom which was centered around Will Smith, The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air. Jones was also the executive producer of the show.
Quincy Jones will forever be remembered as someone who helped sculpt music in every form, he refined music and through the music he helped sculpt brought messages of peace, justice, love, funk, and hope.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, but brought up in Pennsylvania, where he played the flute in a local band, as a youth, before sending some arrangements to Benny Goodman. Goodman offered him a job and, after serving in WWII, he joined the rearranged Glenn Miller band. In 1952, he was given a two-week assignment at Universal to work on an Bud Abbott and Lou Costello film and ended up staying for six years. Success with The Glenn Miller Story (1954) allowed him to score many other films, helping along the way to change the style of film background music by injecting jazz into the traditional orchestral arrangements of the 1950s. He was nominated for 18 Oscars and won four; in addition, he won 20 Grammys and 2 Emmys, made over 50 albums and had 500 works published. Mancini collaborated extensively with Blake Edwards -- firstly on TV's Peter Gunn (1958), then on Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), which won him two Oscars; he won further Oscars for the titles song for Days of Wine and Roses (1962) and the score for Victor/Victoria (1982); he will be best-remembered for the theme tune for The Pink Panther (1963).- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
German-American pianist, composer, arranger and conductor André George Previn (born Andreas Ludwig Priwin, in Berlin) was for eight decades a hugely influential and prolific figure in jazz, as well as classical and film music. Being Jewish, Previn's family was forced to leave Hitler's Germany in 1939. Hollywood naturally beckoned, since André's grand uncle (Charles Previn) was already well established as musical director at Universal (1936-42). Child prodigy André recorded his first piano jazz album at the age of sixteen while continuing studies at Beverly Hills High School.
He joined MGM at age 17 in 1946 (initially as an uncredited music supervisor/arranger), later as orchestra conductor and still later as a composer of film scores. He remained under contract at the studio until 1960. During his tenure in Hollywood, he was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning four (all for Best Adapted Score: Gigi (1958), Porgy and Bess (1959), Irma la Douce (1963), and My Fair Lady (1964)). In the 1950s, he recorded several acclaimed jazz albums with drummer Shelly Manne and pianist Russ Freeman, featuring excellent tracks like "Who's on First" and "Strike Out the Band". He began conducting with the St. Louis Symphony in 1961 while still working primarily as a jazz and studio musician. Much of his recorded work consisted of show tunes adapted for jazz. Gradually, his interest in classical music won out.
By the late 1960s, Previn had settled in England and in 1968 was made principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, a position he occupied for eleven years. His popularity led to cameo TV appearances (including a famous sketch for the 1971 Christmas special of the The Morecambe & Wise Show (1968), in which he appeared as "Mr. Andrew Preview") and television advertising (Vauxhall, Ferguson TX portable television etc.). From 1985 to 1989, he was musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well as with the Royal Philharmonic (1985-88, subsequently also principal conductor, from 1988-91).
In 1993, he was appointed conductor laureate of the London Symphony and three years later was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to music. He won 10 Grammy Awards (including two for jazz and two for film music) and was nominated for six Emmys. Previn latterly returned to recording jazz albums with, among others, Ella Fitzgerald (1983), Joe Pass & Ray Brown (1989), and Kiri Te Kanawa (1992). Two excellent tribute albums released, respectively in 1998 and 2000 for Deutsche Grammophon, were 'We Got Rhythm: A Gershwin Songbook' and 'We Got it Good: An Ellington Songbook'.
Married (and divorced) five times, his ex-wives included Dory Previn and Mia Farrow. Previn died in New York on February 28, 2019, aged 89.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Born in Milan in 1911 into a family of musicians, Nino Rota was first a student of Orefice and Pizzetti. Then, still a child, he moved to Rome where he completed his studies at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in 1929 with Alfredo Casella. In the meantime, he had become an 'enfant prodige', famous both as a composer and as an orchestra conductor. His first oratorio, "L'infanzia di San Giovanni Battista," was performed in Milan and Paris as early as 1923 and his lyrical comedy, "Il Principe Porcaro," was composed in 1926. From 1930 to 1932, Nino Rota lived in the USA. He won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia where he attended classes in composition taught by Rosario Scalero and classes in orchestra taught by Fritz Reiner. He returned to Italy and earned a degree in literature from the University of Milan. In 1937, he began a teaching career that led to the directorship of the Bari Conservatory, a title he held from 1950 until his death in 1979. After his "childhood" compositions, Nino Rota wrote the following operas: Ariodante (Parma 1942), Torquemada (1943), Il cappello di paglia di Firenze (Palermo 1955), I due timidi (RAI 1950, London 1953), La notte di un neurastenico (Premio Italia 1959, La Scala 1960), Lo scoiattolo in gamba (Venezia 1959), Aladino e la lampada magica (Naples 1968), La visita meravigliosa (Palermo 1970), Napoli milionaria (Spoleto Festival 1977). He also wrote the following ballets: La rappresentazione di Adamo ed Eva (Perugia 1957), La Strada (La Scala 1965), Aci e Galatea (Rome 1971), Le Molière imaginaire (Paris and Brussels 1976) and Amor di poeta (Brussels 1978) for Maurice Béjart. In addition, there are countless works for orchestra that have been performed since before World War II and are still performed by orchestras in every part of the world. His work in film dates back to the early forties. His filmography includes the names of virtually all of the noted directors of his time. First among these is Federico Fellini. He wrote all of the movie scores for Fellini's films from The White Sheik (1952) in 1952 to Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) in 1978. Other directors include Renato Castellani, Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli, Mario Monicelli, Francis Ford Coppola (Oscar for best original score for The Godfather Part II (1974)), King Vidor, René Clément, Edward Dmytryk, and 'Eduardo de Filippo'. He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti, Zefirelli, and de Filippo. In February of 1995, the Nino Rota Foundation was established at Fondazione Cini of Venice, Italy. Cini specializes in the works of 20th century Italian composers and includes the estate of Casella.- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the toothbrush mustache, bowler hat, bamboo cane, and a funny walk.
Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in Walworth, London, England on April 16, 1889, to Hannah Harriet Pedlingham (Hill) and Charles Chaplin, both music hall performers, who were married on June 22, 1885. After Charles Sr. separated from Hannah to perform in New York City, Hannah then tried to resurrect her stage career. Unfortunately, her singing voice had a tendency to break at unexpected moments. When this happened, the stage manager spotted young Charlie standing in the wings and led him on stage, where five-year-old Charlie began to sing a popular tune. Charlie and his half-brother, Syd Chaplin spent their lives in and out of charity homes and workhouses between their mother's bouts of insanity. Hannah was committed to Cane Hill Asylum in May 1903 and lived there until 1921, when Chaplin moved her to California.
Chaplin began his official acting career at the age of eight, touring with the Eight Lancashire Lads. At age 18, he began touring with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe, joining them on the troupe's 1910 United States tour. He traveled west to California in December 1913 and signed on with Keystone Studios' popular comedy director Mack Sennett, who had seen Chaplin perform on stage in New York. Charlie soon wrote his brother Syd, asking him to become his manager. While at Keystone, Chaplin appeared in and directed 35 films, starring as the Little Tramp in nearly all.
In November 1914, he left Keystone and signed on at Essanay, where he made 15 films. In 1916, he signed on at Mutual and made 12 films. In June 1917, Chaplin signed up with First National Studios, after which he built Chaplin Studios. In 1919, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists (UA).
Chaplin's life and career was full of scandal and controversy. His first big scandal was during World War I, at which time his loyalty to England, his home country, was questioned. He had never applied for American citizenship, but claimed that he was a "paying visitor" to the United States. Many British citizens called Chaplin a coward and a slacker. This and other career eccentricities sparked suspicion with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), who believed that he was injecting Communist propaganda into his films. Chaplin's later film The Great Dictator (1940), which was his first "talkie", also created a stir. In the film, Chaplin plays a humorous caricature of Adolf Hitler. Some thought the film was poorly done and in bad taste. However, the film grossed over $5 million and earned five Academy Award Nominations.
Another scandal occurred when Chaplin briefly dated 22 year-old Joan Barry. However, Chaplin's relationship with Barry came to an end in 1942, after a series of harassing actions from her. In May 1943, Barry returned to inform Chaplin that she was pregnant and filed a paternity suit, claiming that the unborn child was his. During the 1944 trial, blood tests proved that Chaplin was not the father, but at the time, blood tests were inadmissible evidence, and he was ordered to pay $75 a week until the child turned 21.
Chaplin also was scrutinized for his support in aiding the Russian struggle against the invading Nazis during World War II, and the United States government questioned his moral and political views, suspecting him of having Communist ties. For this reason, HUAC subpoenaed him in 1947. However, HUAC finally decided that it was no longer necessary for him to appear for testimony. Conversely, when Chaplin and his family traveled to London for the premier of Limelight (1952), he was denied re-entry to the United States. In reality, the government had almost no evidence to prove that he was a threat to national security. Instead, he and his wife decided to settle in Switzerland.
Chaplin was married four times and had a total of 11 children. In 1918, he married Mildred Harris and they had a son together, Norman Spencer Chaplin, who lived only three days. Chaplin and Harris divorced in 1920. He married Lita Grey in 1924, who had two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr. and Sydney Chaplin. They were divorced in 1927. In 1936, Chaplin married Paulette Goddard, and his final marriage was to Oona O'Neill (Oona Chaplin), daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1943. Oona gave birth to eight children: Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Chaplin, Josephine Chaplin, Victoria Chaplin, Eugene Chaplin, Jane Chaplin, Annette-Emilie Chaplin, and Christopher Chaplin.
In contrast to many of his boisterous characters, Chaplin was a quiet man who kept to himself a great deal. He also had an "un-millionaire" way of living. Even after he had accumulated millions, he continued to live in shabby accommodations. In 1921, Chaplin was decorated by the French government for his outstanding work as a filmmaker and was elevated to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1952. In 1972, he was honored with an Academy Award for his "incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century". He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. No formal reason for the honour was listed. The citation simply reads "Charles Spencer Chaplin, Film Actor and Producer".
Chaplin's other works included musical scores that he composed for many of his films. He also authored two autobiographical books, "My Autobiography" (1964) and its companion volume, "My Life in Pictures" (1974).
Chaplin died at age 88 of natural causes on December 25, 1977 at his home in Vevey, Switzerland. His funeral was a small and private Anglican ceremony according to his wishes. In 1978, Chaplin's corpse was stolen from its grave and was not recovered for three months; he was re-buried in a vault surrounded by cement.
Six of Chaplin's films have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress: The Immigrant (1917), The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940).
Charlie Chaplin is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema, whose movies were and still are popular throughout the world and have even gained notoriety as time progresses. His films show, through the Little Tramp's positive outlook on life in a world full of chaos, that the human spirit has and always will remain the same.- Writer
- Music Department
- Composer
Renowned composer ("West Side Story", "Candide", "On The Town"), conductor, arranger, pianist, educator, author, TV/radio host, educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard University (BA) with Walter Piston. Edward Burlingame Hill and A. Tillman Merritt. He studied piano with Helen Coates, Heinrich Gebhard and Isabelle Vengerova, at the Curtis Institute with Fritz Reiner, and at the Berkshire Music Center with Serge Koussevitzky (and became an assistant to Koussevitzky). He was assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1943-1944, and conductor of the New York Symphony, 1945-1948.
He was music advisor to the Israel Philharmonic from 1948-1949, and a member of the faculty at the Berkshire Music Center from 1948 (though he did take leaves of absence), and head of the conducting department there in 1951. He was Professor of Music at Brandeis University, 1951-1956; and co-conductor of the New York Philharmonic, 1957-1958, and music director there after 1958. He won an Emmy award for his televised Young People's Concerts. He was guest conductor of symphony orchestras in the USA and Europe, and conducted the Israel Philharmonic seven times between 1947 and 1957. He toured the US with Koussevitzky in 1951, and was the first American to conduct at the La Scala Opera House in Milan, in 1953. He was awarded the Sonning Prize in Denmark, and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
He joined ASCAP in 1944, and his chief musical collaborators included Betty Comden, Adolph Green, John Latouche, and Stephen Sondheim. His song compositions include "New York, New York", "Lonely Town", "Some Other Time", "I Can Cook, Too", "I Get Carried Away", "Lucky to Be Me", "Ohio", "A Quiet Girl", "It's Love", "A Little Bit in Love", "Wrong Note Rag", "Glitter and Be Gay", "El Dorado", "The Best of All Possible Worlds", "Maria", "Tonight", "Something's Coming", "I Feel Pretty", "Cool", "America", and "Gee, Officer Krupke".- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Violinist and conductor Victor Young was a prolific composer and arranger, who worked on more than 300 film scores over a period of twenty years. He came from an impoverished, but musical background and was trained on the violin at the Warsaw Imperial Conservatory, later studying piano in Paris under the French master Isidor Philipp. A prodigious talent, Young made his professional debut as a teenager with the Warsaw Philharmonic. However, World War I intervened, and he spent several months interned in a prison facility in Russia. Somehow, he was able to escape. By 1920, he had found his way to the United States and resumed work as a violinist with the Central Park Casino Orchestra in Chicago. He also diversified as an arranger and conductor for radio and the theatre. His first connection with the film industry came about, when he secured a position as assistant director with the Balaban and Katz cinema chain, writing and arranging as many as five (silent) film scores a week.
During the late 1920's, Young was back as musical director for 'Harvest of Stars' on radio, and as a talent scout for Edison Records. He briefly arranged for bandleader Ted Fio Rito before fronting his own orchestra in 1935, backed by a recording deal with Decca. He worked with many of the great vocalists of the period, including Judy Garland, Lee Wiley and The Boswell Sisters. His high profile brought him to the attention of Paramount, where he was signed to a one-year contract in 1936. He worked for the studio again between 1940 and 1949, but, by that time, his reputation had become so formidable that he came to be regarded as the pre-eminent film composer, and assigned the lion's share of A-grade features. His music subtly and seamlessly integrated into dramas like Reap the Wild Wind (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), So Evil My Love (1948), John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) and the western classic Shane (1953).
Young also wrote countless evergreen songs, many for top-flight singers, like Bing Crosby. His first big hit was "Sweet Sue" (popularly recorded by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra), followed by the melodic jazz standard "Stella by Starlight" (which served as the theme for The Uninvited (1944)) and the ballad "When I Fall in Love" (a huge hit for Nat 'King' Cole, who featured the song in the movie Istanbul (1957)). For Broadway, Young wrote both music and lyrics for "Seventh Heaven", in 1955. Nominated for a staggering 22 Academy Awards, Young had his only win (for Around the World in 80 Days (1956)), rather sadly, after his sudden death from a stroke at the age of 56. It has been suggested, that his film compositions, while polished, lacked the élan or authoritative stamp of a Max Steiner or a Bernard Herrmann. Nonetheless, the sheer volume and enduring popularity of Young's music ensure his immortality among the ranks of the great songwriters and film composers of the 20th century.- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the son of a well-known music critic. A child prodigy, he accompanied his father in playing four-handed piano arrangements by the age of five. By the age of eleven he drew his first plaudits from enthusiastic Viennese audiences (including the emperor Franz Josef) with his ballet-pantomime "Der Schneeman" (The Snow Man). Two years later, he wrote a piano sonata which was performed by Artur Schnabel. Korngold composed his first orchestral piece at 14 and attracted the attention of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many other prominent composers and conductors. In 1920, he conducted the Hamburg Opera performing his seminal work "Die tote Stadt" which became a huge international success. Thus embarked upon a promising career as a serious composer, Korngold was invited to the United States by Max Reinhardt to score A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) -- and decided to stay. He was certainly grateful for the chance to escape Adolf Hitler's annexation of Austria. In 1943, Korngold became an American citizen.
Korngold was the first composer of international renown to be signed by Hollywood despite having no prior experience with film music. His approach to the medium was predominantly theatrical and operatic (he once described Tosca as "the best film score ever written"). A master of technique, credited with "inventing" the syntax of orchestral film music, he composed at the piano with projectionists running reels at his behest. Often, he worked in conjunction with the orchestra of Hugo Friedhofer who became his closest collaborator. Under contract to Warner Brothers from 1935 to 1947, Korngold picked up Academy Awards for Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). His stirring and string-laden scores were ideally suited for such high-octane Errol Flynn swashbucklers as Captain Blood (1935) and The Sea Hawk (1940). In the final analysis, other notable film composers, including even the great Max Steiner, admitted to being influenced by Korngold's work. His 1937 violin concerto which used various elements from his film music became one of the most prolifically performed classical concerts of the 20th century.
Korngold would have longed to resume his career as a serious composer. However, after the war ended, he found that the world of serious music had passed him by. In 1949, he returned to Vienna with his wife but found the city in ruins and much changed. A year later, disillusioned, he moved back to his home in the Toluca Lake district in North Hollywood. During the final ten years of his life he composed almost exclusively for concert halls. In 1956, he suffered a stroke which left him partially paralysed and he died a year later at the age of 60 from a heart attack.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Bill Conti was born on 13 April 1942 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He is a composer and actor, known for For Your Eyes Only (1981), Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid Part II (1986). He is married to Shelby Cox. They have two children.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Alex North studied music at the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia, then won a scholarship to Juilliard in New York (1929) and the Moscow Conservatoire (1933), making him the first-ever American to become a member of the Union of Soviet Composers. In Europe, he worked as music director for the Latvian State Theatre, before returning to the U.S. in 1935 to perfect his craft under the auspices of Aaron Copland. At the same time, he produced his first compositions, including two symphonies, chamber music and dance scores for Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille. After a spell in Mexico as conductor/composer, he served as a captain with the U.S. Army, in charge of 'self-entertainment programs' for hospitalised psychiatric patients. He also did his first film work, scoring documentaries for the Office of War Information.
Profoundly influenced by, above all, Duke Ellington, North began to write several innovative compositions in jazz. His 'Revue for Clarinet and Orchestra' was originally commissioned by Benny Goodman and first performed in 1946 under the direction of Goodman and Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Joining ASCAP in 1947, North went on to compose theatrical scores, including 'Death of a Salesman' for Elia Kazan and this opened the door to Hollywood. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) was the first all-jazz score ever written for a motion picture. His next assignment was the film version of Death of a Salesman (1951), followed by Viva Zapata! (1952), for which he used traditional instruments, including marimbas and timbales.
Much of his subsequent work was characterised by sparse instrumentation (as, for example, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and the Oscar-nominated Under the Volcano (1984)). He used jazz again, evocatively, to score The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and The Sound and the Fury (1959), but was rather less successful on more conventional themes, such as The Misfits (1961). One of his most beautiful and lyrical works was the love theme from Spartacus (1960). For the small screen, he composed the music for the two instalments of the popular miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). Alex North was Oscar-nominated fifteen times but only received the coveted statuette as a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
A classmate of director Sergio Leone with whom he would form one of the great director/composer partnerships (right up there with Eisenstein & Prokofiev, Hitchcock & Herrmann, Fellini & Rota), Ennio Morricone studied at Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory, where he specialized in trumpet. His first film scores were relatively undistinguished, but he was hired by Leone for A Fistful of Dollars (1964) on the strength of some of his song arrangements. His score for that film, with its sparse arrangements, unorthodox instrumentation (bells, electric guitars, harmonicas, the distinctive twang of the jew's harp) and memorable tunes, revolutionized the way music would be used in Westerns, and it is hard to think of a post-Morricone Western score that doesn't in some way reflect his influence. Although his name will always be synonymous with the spaghetti Western, Morricone has also contributed to a huge range of other film genres: comedies, dramas, thrillers, horror films, romances, art movies, exploitation movies - making him one of the film world's most versatile artists. He has written nearly 400 film scores, so a brief summary is impossible, but his most memorable work includes the Leone films, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) , Roland Joffé's The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988), plus a rare example of sung opening credits for Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966).- Music Artist
- Music Department
- Composer
Randy Newman is an American film composer and singer who is well-known for composing The Princess and the Frog, Meet the Parents and various Pixar films including the Toy Story, Monsters, Inc and Cars franchises as well as A Bug's Life. He wrote iconic songs such as "Short People", "You've Got A Friend in Me" and "We Belong Together". He won Best Original Song for Toy Story 3.- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
In his ongoing, decades-long career as a composer, Alan Silvestri has blazed an innovative trail with his exciting and melodic scores, winning the applause of Hollywood and movie audiences the world over. With a credit list of over 100 films Silvestri has composed some of the most recognizable and beloved themes in movie history. His efforts have been recognized with two Oscar nominations, two Golden Globe nominations, three Grammy awards, two Emmy awards, and numerous International Film Music Critics Awards, Saturn Awards, and Hollywood Music In Media Awards.
Born in New York City and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, Silvestri first dreamed of becoming a jazz guitar player. After spending two years at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, he hit the road as a performer and arranger. Landing in Hollywood at the age of 22, he found himself successfully composing the music for 1972's "The Doberman Gang" which established his place in the world of film composing.
The 1970s witnessed the rise of energetic synth-pop scores, establishing Silvestri as the action rhythmatist for TV's highway patrol hit "CHiPs." This action driven score caught the ear of a young filmmaker named Robert Zemeckis, whose hit film, 1984's "Romancing the Stone," was the perfect first date for the composer and director. It's success became the basis of a decades long collaboration that continues to this day. Their numerous collaborations have taken them through fascinating landscapes and stylistic variations, from the "Back to the Future" trilogy to the jazzy world of Toontown in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" the tension filled rooms of "What Lies Beneath" and "Death Becomes Her", to the cosmic wonder of "Contact;" the emotional isolation of "Castaway", to the magic of the "Polar Express". But perhaps no film collaboration defines their creative relationship better than Zemeckis' 1994 Best Picture winner, "Forrest Gump", for which Silvestri's gift for melodically beautiful themes earned him an Oscar and Golden Globe nomination and the affection of film music lovers everywhere. This 35 year, 21 film collaboration includes such recent films as "Flight", "Allied" and most recently "Welcome To Marwen". Zemeckis and Silvestri are currently working on "The Witches" based on Roald Dahl's 1973 classic book scheduled for release in October of 2020.
Though the Zemeckis/Silvestri collaboration is legendary, Silvestri has scored films of every imaginable style and genre. His energy has brought excitement and emotion to the hard-hitting orchestral scores for Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One", James Cameron's "The Abyss" as well as "Predator" and "The Mummy Returns." Alan's diversity is on full display in family entertainment films such as "The Father of the Bride 1 and 2", "Parent Trap", "Stuart Little 1 and 2", Disney's "Lilo and Stitch", "The Croods" as well as "Night at the Museum 1, 2 and 3" while his passion for melody fuels the romantic emotion of films like "The Bodyguard" and "What Women Want".
Most recently, Alan has composed the music for Marvel's "Avengers: Endgame." The film is the culmination of a partnership with Marvel that began in 2011 with Alan's dynamically heroic score for "Captain America: The First Avenger" followed by "Avengers". Since 2011 Alan's collaboration with Marvel helped propel "The Avengers" and "Avengers: Infinity War" to spectacular world-wide success.
Silvestri's success has also crossed into the world of songwriting. His partnership with Six-Time Grammy Award winner Glen Ballard has produced hits such as the Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated song "Believe" (Josh Groban) for "The Polar Express", "Butterfly Fly Away" (Miley Cyrus) for "Hannah Montana The Movie", "God Bless Us Everyone" (Andrea Bocelli) for "A Christmas Carol" and "A Hero Comes Home" (Idina Menzel) for "Beowulf".
Alan and his wife Sandra are long time residents of California's central coast. In 1998 the Silvestri family embarked on a new venture as the founders of Silvestri Vineyards. Their wines show that lovingly cultivated fruit has a music all its own. "There's something about the elemental side of winemaking that appeals to me," he says. "Both music making and wine making involve a magical blending of art and science. Just as each note brings it own voice to the melody, each vine brings it's own unique personality to the wine."
Their other great passion is the ongoing search for the cure to Type 1 Juvenile Diabetes. With the diagnosis of their son at two years of age (now 29) they continue to work the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and dream of the day this disease (and all of the suffering it brings to so many) will finally become a thing of the past.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Howard Shore is a Canadian composer, born in Toronto. He was born in a Jewish family. He started studying music when 8-years-old, and played as a member of bands by the time he was 13-years-old. He was interested in a professional career in music as a teenager. He studied music at the Berklee College of Music, a college of contemporary music located in Boston.
For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Shore was a member of Lighthouse, a jazz fusion band. In the 1970s, Shore mainly composed music for theatrical performances and a few television shows. His most notable work was composing the music for the one-man-act show of stage magician Doug Henning. He also served as a musical director in then-new television show "Saturday Night Live" (1975-). He was hired by the show's producer Lorne Michaels, who was a close friend of Shore since their teen years.
In 1978, Shore started his career as a film score composer, with scoring the B-movie " I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses" (1978). His next film score was composed for the horror film "The Brood" (1979). Shore had a good working relationship with the film's director David Cronenberg. Cronenberg would continue to use Shore as the composer of most of his films, with the exception of "The Dead Zone" (1983).
In the 1980s, Shore also composed the film scores of works by other directors, such as "After Hours" (1985) by Martin Scorsese, and "Big" (1988) by Penny Marshall. He received more acclaim for composing the film score for "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991), a major hit of its era. Shore was nominated for a BAFTA award for this film score.
By the 1990s, Shore was an established composer of high repute and worked in an ever increasing number of films. Among his better known works were the film scores for comedy film "Mrs. Doubtfire" (1993) and crime thriller "Seven" (1995). Shore received even more critical acclaim in the 2000s, when he composed the film score for fantasy film "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001). He won an Academy Award and a Grammy for the film score, and received nominations for a BAFTA award and a Golden Globe.
Shore continued his career with the film scores of acclaimed films "Gangs of New York" (2002), "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" (2002), and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (2003). He received his second Academy Award for the film score of "The Return of the King", and his third Academy Award as the composer of hit song "Into the West". He won several other major awards for these film scores. His film scores for "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy are considered the most famous and successful works of his career.
For the rest of the 2000s, Shore closely collaborated with director Martin Scorsese. Shore won a Golden Globe for the film score of Scorsese's "The Aviator" (2004). In the 2010s, Shore continues to work regularly, mostly known for composing film scores for works by directors David Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Jackson. He was the main composer for "The Hobbit" trilogy by Peter Jackson, and the fantasy film "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" (2010) by David Slade.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
John Barry was born in York, England in 1933, and was the youngest of three children. His father, Jack, owned several local cinemas and by the age of fourteen, Barry was capable of running the projection box on his own - in particular, The Rialto in York. As he was brought up in a cinematic environment, he soon began to assimilate the music which accompanied the films he saw nightly to a point when, even before he'd left St. Peters school, he had decided to become a film music composer. Helped by lessons provided locally on piano and trumpet, followed by the more exacting theory taught by tutors as diverse as Dr Francis Jackson of York Minster and William Russo, formerly arranger to Stan Kenton and His Orchestra, he soon became equipped to embark upon his chosen career, but had no knowledge of how one actually got a start in the business. A three year sojourn in the army as a bandsman combined with his evening stints with local jazz bands gave him the idea to ease this passage by forming a small band of his own. This was how The John Barry Seven came into existence, and Barry successfully launched them during 1957 via a succession of tours and TV appearances. A recording contract with EMI soon followed, and although initial releases made by them failed to chart, Barry's undoubted talent showed enough promise to influence the studio management at Abbey Road in allowing him to make his debut as an arranger and conductor for other artists on the EMI roster.
A chance meeting with a young singer named Adam Faith, whilst both were appearing on astage show version of the innovative BBC TV programme, Six-Five Special (1957), led Barry to recommend Faith for a later BBC TV series, Drumbeat (1959), which was broadcast in 1959. Faith had made two or three commercially unsuccessful records before singer/songwriter Johnny Worth, also appearing on Drumbeat, offered him a song he'd just finished entitled What Do You Want? With the assistance of the JB7 pianist, Les Reed, Barry contrived an arrangement considered suited to Faith's soft vocal delivery, and within weeks, the record was number one. Barry (and Faith) then went from strength to strength; Faith achieving a swift succession of chart hits, with Barry joining him soon afterwards when the Seven, riding high on the wave of the early sixties instrumental boom, scored with Hit & Miss, Walk Don't Run and Black Stockings.
Faith had long harboured ambitions to act even before his first hit record and was offered a part in the up and coming British movie, Wild for Kicks (1960), at that time. As Barry was by then arranging not only his recordings but also his live Drumbeat material, it came as no surprise when the film company asked him to write the score to accompany Faith's big screen debut. It should be emphasised that the film was hardly a cinematic masterpiece. However, it did give Faith a chance to demonstrate his acting potential, and Barry the chance to show just how quickly he'd mastered the technique of film music writing. Although the film and soundtrack album were both commercial successes, further film score offers failed to flood in. On those that did, such as Never Let Go (1960) and The Amorous Mr. Prawn (1962), Barry proved highly inventive, diverse and adaptable and, as a result, built up a reputation as an emerging talent. It was with this in mind that Noel Rogers, of United Artists Music, approached him in the summer of '62, with a view to involving him in the music for the forthcoming James Bond film, Dr. No (1962).
He was also assisted onto the cinematic ladder as a result of a burgeoning relationship with actor/writer turned director Bryan Forbes, who asked him to write a couple of jazz numbers for use in a club scene in Forbes' then latest film, The L-Shaped Room (1962). From this very modest beginning, the couple went on to collaborate on five subsequent films, including the highly acclaimed Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), King Rat (1965) and The Whisperers (1967). Other highlights from the sixties included five more Bond films, Zulu (1964), Born Free (1966) (a double Oscar), The Lion in Winter (1968) (another Oscar) and Midnight Cowboy (1969).
In the seventies he scored the cult film Walkabout (1971), The Last Valley (1971), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) (Oscar nomination), wrote the theme for The Persuaders! (1971), a musical version of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and the hit musical Billy. Then, in 1974, he made the decision to leave his Thameside penthouse apartment for the peace of a remote villa he was having built in Majorca. He had been living there for about a year, during which time he turned down all film scoring opportunities, until he received an invitation to write the score for the American TV movie, Eleanor and Franklin (1976). In order to accomplish the task, he booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel for six weeks in October 1975. However, during this period, he was also offered Robin and Marian (1976) and King Kong (1976), which caused his stay to be extended. He was eventually to live and work in the hotel for almost a year, as more assignments were offered and accepted. His stay on America's West Coast eventually lasted almost five years, during which time he met and married his wife, Laurie, who lived with him at his Beverly Hills residence. They moved to Oyster Bay, New York and have since split their time between there and a house in Cadogan Square, London.
After adopting a seemingly lower profile towards the end of the seventies, largely due to the relatively obscure nature of the commissions he accepted, the eighties saw John Barry re-emerge once more into the cinematic limelight. This was achieved, not only by continuing to experiment and diversify, but also by mixing larger budget commissions of the calibre of Body Heat (1981), Jagged Edge (1985), Out of Africa (1985) (another Oscar) and The Cotton Club (1984) with smaller ones such as the TV movies, Touched by Love (1980) and Svengali (1983). Other successes included: Somewhere in Time (1980), Frances (1982), three more Bond films, and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).
After serious illness in the late eighties, Barry returned with yet another Oscar success with Dances with Wolves (1990) and was also nominated for Chaplin (1992). Since then he scored the controversial Indecent Proposal (1993), My Life (1993), Deception (1992), Cry, the Beloved Country (1995) and has made compilation albums for Sony (Moviola and Moviola II) and non-soundtrack albums for Decca ('The Beyondness Of Things' & 'Eternal Echoes').
In the late nineties he made a staggeringly successful return to the concert arena, playing to sell-out audiences at the Royal Albert Hall. Since then he has appeared as a guest conductor at a RAH concert celebrating the life and career of Elizabeth Taylor and made brief appearances at a couple of London concerts dedicated to his music. In 2004 he re-united with Don Black to write his fifth stage musical, Brighton Rock, which enjoyed a limited run at The Almeida Theatre in London.
He continued to appear at concerts of his own music, often making brief appearances at the podium. In November 2007, Christine Albanel, the French Minister for Culture, appointed him Commander in the National Order of Arts and Letters. The award was made at the eighth International Festival Music and Cinema, in Auxerre, France, when, in his honour, a concert of his music also took place.
In August 2008 he was working on a new album, provisionally entitled Seasons, which he has described as "a soundtrack of his life." A new biography, "John Barry: The Man with The Midas Touch", by Geoff Leonard, Pete Walker, and Gareth Bramley, was published in November 2008.
He died following a heart-attack on 30th January 2011, at his home in Oyster Bay, New York.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
James Horner began studying piano at the age of five, and trained at the Royal College of Music in London, England, before moving to California in the 1970s. After receiving a bachelor's degree in music at USC, he would go on to earn his master's degree at UCLA and teach music theory there. He later completed his Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory at UCLA. Horner began scoring student films for the American Film Institute in the late 1970s, which paved the way for scoring assignments on a number of small-scale films. His first large, high-profile project was composing music for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), which would lead to numerous other film offers and opportunities to work with world-class performers such as the London Symphony Orchestra. With over 75 projects to his name, and work with people such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Oliver Stone, and Ron Howard, Horner firmly established himself as a strong voice in the world of film scoring. In addition, Horner composed a classical concert piece in the 1980s, called "Spectral Shimmers", which was world premiered by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Horner passed away in a plane crash on June 22, 2015, two months short of his 62nd birthday.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
German-born composer Hans Zimmer is recognized as one of Hollywood's most innovative musical talents. He featured in the music video for The Buggles' single "Video Killed the Radio Star", which became a worldwide hit and helped usher in a new era of global entertainment as the first music video to be aired on MTV (August 1, 1981).
Hans Florian Zimmer was born in Frankfurt am Main, then in West Germany, the son of Brigitte (Weil) and Hans Joachim Zimmer. He entered the world of film music in London during a long collaboration with famed composer and mentor Stanley Myers, which included the film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). He soon began work on several successful solo projects, including the critically acclaimed A World Apart, and during these years Zimmer pioneered the use of combining old and new musical technologies. Today, this work has earned him the reputation of being the father of integrating the electronic musical world with traditional orchestral arrangements.
A turning point in Zimmer's career came in 1988 when he was asked to score Rain Man for director Barry Levinson. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year and earned Zimmer his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Score. The next year, Zimmer composed the score for another Best Picture Oscar recipient, Driving Miss Daisy (1989), starring Jessica Tandy, and Morgan Freeman.
Having already scored two Best Picture winners, in the early 1990s, Zimmer cemented his position as a preeminent talent with the award-winning score for The Lion King (1994). The soundtrack has sold over 15 million copies to date and earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a Golden Globe, an American Music Award, a Tony, and two Grammy Awards. In total, Zimmer's work has been nominated for 7 Golden Globes, 7 Grammys and seven Oscars for Rain Man (1988), Gladiator (2000), The Lion King (1994), As Good as It Gets (1997), The The Preacher's Wife (1996), The Thin Red Line (1998), The Prince of Egypt (1998), and The Last Samurai (2003).
With his career in full swing, Zimmer was anxious to replicate the mentoring experience he had benefited from under Stanley Myers' guidance. With state-of-the-art technology and a supportive creative environment, Zimmer was able to offer film-scoring opportunities to young composers at his Santa Monica-based musical "think tank." This approach helped launch the careers of such notable composers as Mark Mancina, John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, Nick Glennie-Smith, and Klaus Badelt.
In 2000, Zimmer scored the music for Gladiator (2000), for which he received an Oscar nomination, in addition to Golden Globe and Broadcast Film Critics Awards for his epic score. It sold more than three million copies worldwide and spawned a second album Gladiator: More Music From The Motion Picture, released on the Universal Classics/Decca label. Zimmer's other scores that year included Mission: Impossible II (2000), The Road to El Dorado (2000), and An Everlasting Piece (2000), directed by Barry Levinson.
Some of his other impressive scores include Pearl Harbor (2001), The Ring (2002), four films directed by Ridley Scott; Matchstick Men (2003), Hannibal (2001), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Thelma & Louise (1991), Penny Marshall's Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), and A League of Their Own (1992), Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), Tears of the Sun (2003), Ron Howard's Backdraft (1991), Days of Thunder (1990), Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997), and the animated Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) for which he also co-wrote four of the songs with Bryan Adams, including the Golden Globe nominated Here I Am.
At the 27th annual Flanders International Film Festival, Zimmer performed live for the first time in concert with a 100-piece orchestra and a 100-voice choir. Choosing selections from his impressive body of work, Zimmer performed newly orchestrated concert versions of Gladiator, Mission: Impossible II (2000), Rain Man (1988), The Lion King (1994), and The Thin Red Line (1998). The concert was recorded by Decca and released as a concert album entitled "The Wings Of A Film: The Music Of Hans Zimmer."
In 2003, Zimmer completed his 100th film score for the film The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise, for which he received both a Golden Globe and a Broadcast Film Critics nomination. Zimmer then scored Nancy Meyers' comedy Something's Gotta Give (2003), the animated Dreamworks film, Shark Tale (2004) (featuring voices of Will Smith, Renée Zellweger, Robert De Niro, Jack Black, and Martin Scorsese), and Jim Brooks' Spanglish (2004) starring Adam Sandler and Téa Leoni (for which he also received a Golden Globe nomination). His 2005 projects include Paramount's The Weather Man (2005) starring Nicolas Cage, Dreamworks' Madagascar (2005), and the Warner Bros. summer release, Batman Begins (2005).
Zimmer's additional honors and awards include the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Film Composition from the National Board of Review, and the Frederick Loewe Award in 2003 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. He has also received ASCAP's Henry Mancini Award for Lifetime Achievement. Hans and his wife live in Los Angeles and he is the father of four children.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Thomas Newman is an American film score composer. He was born in Los Angeles. His father was notable film score composer Alfred Newman (1900-1970). The Newman family is of Russian-Jewish descent, and includes several other well-known musicians. Thomas' mother Martha Louis Montgomery (1920-2005) wanted her sons to have a musical education. Thomas attended regular lessons in violin as a child. An older Thomas received his musical education while attending the University of Southern California and Yale University. Thomas Newman graduated as Bachelor of Arts in 1977, and a Master of Music in 1978.
Thomas originally composed music for theatrical productions in Broadway, working with his mentor Stephen Sondheim. His uncle Lionel Newman asked him to compose music for the television series "The Paper Chase" (1978-1979, 1986), which was Thomas' first credit in a television production.
In the 1980s, Thomas first worked in film. Composer John Williams, a close family friend, hired Thomas to work in the music department for space opera film "Return of the Jedi" (1983). Thomas' main work in the film was orchestrating the music in a scene where character Darth Vader dies. Afterwards, Thomas was approached by film producer Scott Rudin and hired to work as a film score composer in his own right. His first work in the field was the film score of romantic drama "Reckless" (1984).
While he worked regularly as a film score composer during the 1980s, Thomas reportedly felt he had to retrain himself for a hard and demanding job. It reportedly took him 8 years to not feel fraudulent in his efforts. In 1994, Thomas received his first Academy Award nominations, for the film scores of "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994) and "Little Women" (1994). He lost the Award to rival composer Hans Zimmer, who had been nominated for the film score of the animated film "The Lion King" (1994).
Newman was an established and increasingly famous composer in the 1990s. He received further Academy Award nominations, although he never actually won. Among his more notable works was the film score of the drama film "American Beauty" (1999), which earned Thomas both a Grammy and a BAFTA award. Newman had a good working relationship with the film's director Sam Mendes. Mendes has kept hiring Thomas as the composer for most of his films. The main exception being the comedy-drama film "Away We Go" (2009), which did not have a film score.
In the 2000s, Thomas continued working in high-profile films, such as "Road to Perdition" (2002), "Finding Nemo" (2003), and "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events". By 2006, he had been nominated eight times for an Academy Award, while never winning it. He started joking about his lack of victories in public.
In 2008, Thomas was nominated for two Academy Awards, for both the film score and an original song for the animated film "WALL-E" (2008). He won neither, though the hit song "Down to Earth" earned him a Grammy Award. He continues to work regularly in the 2010s. Among his more acclaimed works were the film scores for spy film "Skyfall" (2012) and period drama "Saving Mr. Banks" (2013). He has continued being nominated for Academy Awards. As of 2020, he has been nominated 15 times for the Academy Award. He is the most nominated living composer to have never actually won an Academy Award, tied with Alex North. He has won a total of 5 Grammy awards.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Michael Kamen was born on 15 April 1948 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a composer and actor, known for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Don Juan DeMarco (1994) and X-Men (2000). He was married to Sandra Keenan. He died on 18 November 2003 in London, England, UK.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
James Newton Howard attended the University of Southern California's music school, but dropped out to tour with Elton John, and eventually compose music for film and television. He started with Head Office (1985) in 1985. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. He currently is a songwriter, record producer, conductor, keyboardist, and film composer.- Composer
- Actor
- Music Department
Patrick Doyle is a classically trained composer.
His first film score, the acclaimed adaptation of "Henry V" with Kenneth Branagh for Renaissance films was scored in 1989. He has subsequently worked with Kenneth Branagh, a long time collaborator on numerous pictures including "Dead Again", "Much Ado About Nothing", "Frankenstein" and "Hamlet".
Patrick has composed over 45 internationally renowned feature film scores including "Indochine", "Sense and Sensibility", "Carlito's Way", "Gosford Park", "A Little Princess", "Bridget Jones's Diary", "Nanny McPhee" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire".
He has collaborated with a host of internationally acclaimed film directors including Robert Altman, Ang Lee, Brian de Palma, Alfonso Cuaron, Mike Newell, Regis Wagnier and Kenneth Branagh.
His concert works include "The Thistle and The Rose", a commission by HRH The Prince of Wales for full choir in honour of the Queen Mother's 90th birthday, "Tam O' Shanter" for the National Schools Orchestra Trust and the violin concerto "Corarsik".
He has recently completed the score for the Marvel Entertainment feature film "Thor," directed by Kenneth Branagh, "La Ligne Droite" for Regis Wagnier and the Twentieth Century Fox film "Caesar Rise of the Apes". He is currently scoring the upcoming Pixar film "Brave" directed by Mark Andrews and after which will score the Sovereign Films film "Effie" directed by Richard Laxton.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Michel Legrand is a three-time Academy Award-winning French composer, conductor and pianist who composed over 200 film and television scores as well as recorded over a hundred albums of jazz, popular and classical music.
He was born on February 24, 1932, in Becon-les-Bruyeres, in the Paris suburbs, France. His father, Raymond Legrand, was a French composer and actor. His mother, Marcelle der Mikaelian, was descended from the Armenian bourgeousie. From 1942 - 1949 young Legrand studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire. There his teachers were Nadia Boulanger and Henri Challan among other renown musicians. He received numerous awards for his skills in composition and piano and mastered a dozen other instruments. In 1947 he attended a concert by Dizzy Gillespie and caught a jazz bug. He started working as a pianist for major French singers. He eventually collaborated with Dizzy Gillespie on several albums and film scores.
In 1954 Legrand became an overnight star after his album "I Love Paris" became a hit, it went on selling over 8 million copies. He followed the success with such albums as "Holiday in Rome" (1955) and "Michel Legrand Plays Cole Porter" (1957). In 1958 he was invited to play at Moscow Festival of Students and Youth. There, in Moscow, he met his future wife, a young French model with who he went on to have three children.
In the late 1950s and 1960s Legrand was caught up in the French New Wave. He scored seven films for jean-Luc Godard, he also made ten films with Jacques Demy, and became responsible for creating the genre of musical in the French Cinema. In 1963 Legrand did The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), the first film musical that was entirely sung. For that film score he received three Oscar nominations. His beautiful, haunting melody, "I Will Wait For You", received nomination for Best Original Song.
In 1966 Legrand decided to take his chances in Hollywood, and moved to Los Angeles with his wife and three children. His friendship with Quincy Jones and Hank Mancini helped him a great deal, especially in meeting the lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman. In 1969 Legrand won his first Oscar for Best Music, Original Song for "The Windmills of Your Mind" and was also nominated for Best Music, Original score for a Motion Picture for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). Eventually Legrand went on to become a star in the US, he received twelve nominations for Academy Awards, and won two more Oscars. He was also nominated for a Grammy 27 times and received 5 Grammys in the 1970s.
In the 1980s and 1990s Legrand continued giving live concerts with his own jazz trio. He also led his big band which he took on several international tours, accompanying such stars as Ray Charles , Diana Ross , Björk , and Stéphane Grappelli who celebrated his 85th birthday in 1992. He also recorded several classical albums, including an album with cross-genre hits entitled "Kiri Sings Michel Legrand" with the opera singer Kiri te Kanawa. During the 2000s Legrand has been working mainly in the studio, and also made several international tours.
In 2005 a compilation of Legrand's best known film soundtracks was released under the title "Le Cinema de Michel Legrand", featuring 90 songs composed in the course of his career.- Music Department
- Composer
- Director
Elliot Goldenthal is an Academy Award-winning composer best known for his original music scores for such films as Frida (2002) and Across the Universe (2007), among his other works.
He was born on May 2, 1954, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a house-painter, and his mother was a seamstress. Young Goldenthal was fond of music and theatre, he played with his school rock band during the 1960s. In 1968, he staged his first ballet at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, from which he graduated in 1971. He attended the Manhattan School of Music, studied under Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, and earned his MA in composition.
Among Goldenthal's most notable works are his original music scores for numerous films, such as Julie Taymor's Frida (2002), Clark Johnson's S.W.A.T. (2003), Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997). Goldenthal also has been collaborating with director Neil Jordan on five films, among those are Michael Collins (1996), and Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), for which he earned two Oscar nominations.
Since the early 1980s, Elliot Goldenthal has been working together with Julie Taymor. Their partnership in film and in life has been one of the most rewarding in film business; the couple made such acclaimed films as Titus (1999), Frida (2002) and Across the Universe (2007), among their other works, earning numerous awards and nominations for their highly innovative creativity.- Music Department
- Composer
- Producer
Alan Menken is an American composer, songwriter, music conductor, director and record producer.
Menken is best known for his scores and songs for films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. His scores and songs for The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and Pocahontas (1995) have each won him two Academy Awards. He also composed the scores and songs for Little Shop of Horrors (1987), Newsies (1992), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Home on the Range (2004), Enchanted (2007), Tangled (2010), among others.
He is also known for his work in musical theatre for Broadway and elsewhere. Some of these are based on his Disney films, but other stage hits include Little Shop of Horrors (1982), A Christmas Carol (1994) and Sister Act (2009).
Menken has collaborated with such lyricists as Lynn Ahrens, Howard Ashman, Jack Feldman, Tim Rice, Glenn Slater, Stephen Schwartz and David Zippel. With eight Academy Award wins, Menken is the second most prolific Oscar winner in the music categories after Alfred Newman, who has 9 Oscars. He has also won 11 Grammy Awards, a Tony Award, Emmy Award, 7 Golden Globe Awards and many other honors.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Musical talent ran in Marvin Hamlisch's family - his father was an accordionist, and at seven Hamlisch was the youngest student ever accepted by Manhattan's Julliard School of Music. Hamlich furthered his education by taking night classes at Queens College and working during the day as a rehearsal pianist for Broadway shows. He eventually began composing songs for stage productions. In 1968 he met film producer Sam Spiegel, resulting in his first film score for The Swimmer (1968) (he had previously written some songs for a low-budget teen epic, Ski Party (1965), but did not do the score for it). Hamlisch became well versed in the very specialized field of film scoring. In addition to scoring films, he ventured into film production as co-producer of The Entertainer (1975). In 1976 he won a Tony award for his scoring of the Broadway show, A Chorus Line (1985).- Composer
- Music Department
- Writer
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Glass worked in his father's radio store and discovered music listening to the offbeat Western classical records customers didn't seem to want. He studied the violin and flute, and obtained early admission to the University of Chicago. After graduating in mathematics and philosophy, he went to New York's Juilliard school, drove a cab, and studied composition with Darius Milhaud and others.
At 23, he moved to Paris to study under the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who taught almost all of the major Western classical composers of the 20th century. While there, he discovered Indian classical music while transcribing the works of Ravi Shankar into Western musical notation for a French filmmaker. A creative turning point, Glass researched non-Western music in India and parts of Africa, and applied the techniques to his own composition.
Back in the United States, Glass spent the late 1960s and early 1970s driving a taxi cab in New York and creating a major collection of new music. In 1976, his landmark opera "Einstein on the Beach" was staged by Robert Wilson to a baffling variety of reviews. His compositions were so avant-garde that he had to form the Philip Glass Ensemble to give them a venue for performance. Although called a minimalist by the Western classical mainstream, he denies this categorization. His major works include opera, theater pieces, dance, and song.
His work in film, beginning with Koyaanisqatsi (1982), gave filmmakers such as Godfrey Reggio and Errol Morris a new venue of expression through the documentary form. His many recordings have also widened his audience. He was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to compose "The Voyage" for the Columbus quinquacentennial in 1992. In 1996, he composed original music for the Atlanta Olympic Games, which, perhaps, made Glass almost mainstream. Glass remains one of the most important American composers. His music is distinctive, haunting, and evocative. Either performed by itself or in collaboration with other media, his compositions move the listener to unexplored places. More recently, a major reexamination of Glass's oeuvre has led him to be labeled the Last Romantic by the musical press.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Michael Giacchino is an American composer of music for films, television and video games.
Giacchino composed the scores to the television series Lost, Alias and Fringe, the video game series Medal of Honor and Call of Duty and many films such as The Incredibles (2004), Star Trek (2009), Up (2009), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), Jurassic World (2015), Inside Out (2015), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) and Coco (2017).
For his work on Up he earned an Academy Award for Best Original Score.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Composer and conductor Alexandre Desplat, Oscar winner and seven-time Academy Award nominated, for his prolific filmography and his collaborations with Stephen Frears, Terrence Malick, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, Jacques Audiard, Wes Anderson, Roman Polanski, George Clooney or Matteo Garrone is one of the most worthy heirs of the French masters of film music.
Brought up in a cultural and musical mix thanks to his Greek mother and his French father who studied and got married in California, he grew up listening to French symphonists, Ravel or Debussy , world music and jazz.
He studied piano and trumpet before choosing the flute as the main instrument. As a free auditor in Claude Ballif's analysis class at the CNSM, he enriches his classical musical education by studying Brazilian and African music. He will record later with Carlinhos Brown or Ray Lema.
Passionate about film music, it's as much his musical sensitivity as his intimate approach to cinematographic language that will allow his privileged relationship with filmmakers. Inspired by the scores of Maurice Jarre, Bernard Herrmann, Nino Rota or Georges Delerue, it is after hearing the score of John Williams for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) that he decides to compose exclusively for the big screen.
During the recording of his first feature film he meets violinist Dominique Lemonnier. This is the beginning of an exceptional artistic exchange as she becomes her favorite soloist, artistic director and wife. With his strong sense of interpretation, his creative spirit and his singular violin playing, Solré inspired Alexandre's compositions, influencing his music in depth, initiating a new way of writing for the strings in the cinema.
Collaborator of Jacques Audiard since his first film, he creates for his works strong and singular compositions and he won in 2005 for The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) the Silver Bear of the Berlinale, and his first Caesar. He works in France with Philippe de Broca and Francis Girod but Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) of Peter Webber, his 50th score for the film, he gets a first Golden Globe nomination and BAFTA and began his rise in Hollywood. Leading American career and European collaborations and remaining faithful to his directors, he composes among others Syriana (2005)'s scores of Stephen Gaghan, Birth (2004) of Jonathan Glazer, Coco Before Chanel (2009) by Anne Fontaine, Army of Crime (2009) by Robert Guédiguian, The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch (2008) by Jérôme Salle, Intimate Enemies (2007) or Hostage (2005) by Florent-Emilio Siri.
Prizes and collaborations with the greatest directors follow one another. In 2007, he received his first Oscar nomination for Stephen Frears's The Queen (2006) and won his first European Film Award. The same year, he won the Golden Globe, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, and the World Soundtrack Award for John Curran's score The Painted Veil (2006), performed by pianist Láng Lang. He composed in 2008 for Lust, Caution (2007) by Ang Lee and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) by David Fincher which will earn him a second Oscar nomination and a fourth Golden Globes and BAFTA nomination.
With his score for The Ghost Writer (2010) by Roman Polanski, he won in 2010 a second César and a second European Film Award. The same year he wrote the music of The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) by Chris Weitz, whose album was a platinum record, and Tom Hooper's The King's Speech (2010) for which he won the BAFTA, the Grammy Award, and was nominated for the fourth time at the Oscars and for the fifth time at the Golden Globes.
In 2010-2011 he wrote the music of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) which became the third greatest success of all time. He composed in 2011 nine partitions, The Tree of Life (2011) of Terrence Malick, Carnage (2011) by Roman Polanski, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) by George Clooney , which earned him another Oscar nomination, The Well-Digger's Daughter (2011) by Daniel Auteuil and The Ides of March (2011) by George Clooney.
In 2012 he worked with Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Matteo Garrone for Reality (2012), Gilles Bourdos for Renoir (2012), Jérôme Salle for Zulu (2013), George Clooney for Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and Jacques Audiard for Rust and Bone (2012) for which he won a third Cesar. For his score of Argo (2012) of Ben Affleck, Oscar for Best Picture, it is named for the sixth time BAFTA, and for the fifth time at the Golden Globes and the Oscars.
He signed in 2013 the partition The Monuments Men (2014) from George Clooney, Venus in Fur (2013) of Roman Polanski, and was appointed to the BAFTAs and the Oscars for Philomena (2013) of Stephen Frears.
In 2014 he composed the music Godzilla (2014) of Gareth Edwards, and receives exceptional fact, two Oscar nominations for The Imitation Game (2014) of Morten Tyldum and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) by George Clooney, for which he won a BAFTA, Grammy and Oscar.
Member of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 2012, he became in 2014 the first composer President of the jury of the Venice Film Festival. Crowning long years of collaboration, he directed the London Symphony Orchestra in December 2014 for a concert of his works at the Barbican Theater in London.
In 2018, Alexandre Desplat received a second Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for The Shape of Water (2017) of Guillermo del Toro.- Composer
- Music Department
- Producer
Harry Gregson-Williams is one of Hollywood's most sought-after and prolific composers whose long list of film and television credits underscore the diverse range of his talents. He most recently wrote the music for "The Last Duel" and "House of Gucci" both directed by Ridley Scott. In addition, he wrote the music for Disney's live action feature film "Mulan" which was directed by Niki Caro with whom he worked previously having scored her film "The Zookeeper's Wife." Gregson-Williams also co-wrote the original song "Loyal Brave True" for "Mulan" performed by Christina Aguilera. He and his brother, composer Rupert Gregson-Williams, wrote the original score for both seasons 1 & 2 of the HBO drama series "The Gilded Age". He also co-wrote the original score for the Netflix documentary "Return to Space" with his friend Mychael Danna, directed by Oscar-winning directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin for which he received an Emmy nomination.
Upcoming 2023 releases include "Meg 2: The Trench" starring Jason and directed by Ben Wheatley and Aardman's animated feature "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget" directed by Sam Fell and the action thriller "Retribution" directed by Nimród Antal and starring Liam Neeson. Gregson-Williams was the composer on all four installments of the animated blockbuster "Shrek" franchise, garnering a BAFTA Award nomination for the score for the Oscar-winning "Shrek." He received Golden Globe and Grammy Award nominations for his score for Andrew Adamson's "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." He has collaborated multiple times with a number of directors including Ben Affleck on "Live by Night," "The Town" and "Gone Baby Gone", Joel Schumacher on "Twelve," "The Number 23," "Veronica Guerin" and "Phone Booth", Tony Scott on "Unstoppable," "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," "Déjà Vu," "Domino," "Man on Fire," "Spy Game" and "Enemy of the State", Ridley Scott on "The Martian," "Prometheus," "Exodus: Gods and Kings," "Kingdom of Heaven," "The Last Duel" and "House of Gucci", Bille August on "Return to Sender" and "Smilla's Sense of Snow", Andrew Adamson on the "Shrek" series, "Mr. Pip" and the first two "Narnia" movies, and Antoine Fuqua on "The Replacement Killers," "The Equalizer," The Equalizer 2" and "Infinite". Some of his more recent film projects include Disney Nature's feature film "Polar Bear" which streamed exclusively on Disney+ in 2022, "The Ambush" directed by Pierre Morel, "Life in a Day 2020" directed Kevin Macdonald, "The Meg" directed by Jon Turteltaub, Aardman's "Early Man" directed by Nick Park for which he received an Annie Award nomination and Disney Nature's "Penguins." His television credits include "Whiskey Cavalier," the miniseries "Catch-22" co-composed with his brother Rupert Gregson-Williams and additionally he wrote the main title theme for "Electric Dreams" and earned an Emmy nomination for the episode entitled "The Commuter." Over the past two decades he has scored three of the five games in the highly successful "Metal Gear Solid" franchise for Konami as well as "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare" for Activision, which became the top-selling video game of 2014 and earned him various music gaming awards. Throughout his illustrious and successful career, Gregson-Williams has also collaborated with a diverse array of recording artists such as Regina Spektor, Imogen Heap, Tricky, Peter Murphy, Flea, Hybrid, Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, Trevor Horn, Trevor Rabin, Lebo M., Perry Farrell and Tony Visconti.
Born in England to a musical family, Gregson-Williams earned a music scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge, at the age of 7 and later gained a coveted spot at London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama, from which he recently received an honorary fellowship. He started his film career as assistant to composer Richard Harvey and later as orchestrator and arranger for Stanley Myers, and then went on to compose his first scores for director Nicolas Roeg. His subsequent collaboration and friendship with composer Hans Zimmer led to Gregson-Williams providing music for such films as "The Rock," "Armageddon" and "The Prince of Egypt" and helped launch his career in Hollywood.
In 2018, Gregson-Williams received the BMI Icon Award, in recognition of his unique and indelible influence on generations of music makers, as well as the Society of Composers & Lyricists' prestigious Ambassador Award.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Carter Burwell was born on 18 November 1954 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a composer and actor, known for Carol (2015), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). He has been married to Christine Sciulli since 1999.- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Richard Morton Sherman was born in the spring of 1928 in New York City to Rosa and Al Sherman. Together with his older brother, Robert B. Sherman, the Sherman brothers would follow in their songwriting father's footsteps to form one of the most prolific, lauded and long lasting songwriting partnerships of all time.
Richard was an enthusiastic and energetic child and youth, still bearing that trademark trait well into his seventies. Following seven years of frequent cross-country moves, the Shermans finally settled down in Beverly Hills, California in 1937. Throughout Richard's years at Beverly Hills High School and Bard College in upstate New York, he became fascinated with music and studied several instruments including the flute, piccolo and piano. At Bard, Richard majored in music and wrote numerous sonatas and "art songs" during his time there but it was Richard's ambition to write the "Great American Symphony" which eventually led him to write songs.
Within two years of graduating, Richard and his brother Robert began writing songs together on a challenge from their father. In 1957, Richard married Elizabeth Gluck with whom he had three children. In 1958, the Sherman brothers enjoyed their first hit with their song, "Tall Paul", sung by Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. The success of this song yielded the attention of Walt Disney, who eventually hired the Sherman brothers on as staff songwriters for Walt Disney Studios.
While at Disney, the Sherman brothers wrote what is perhaps their most well-loved song: "It's a Small World (After All)" for the New York World's Fair in 1964. Since then, "Small World" has become the most translated and performed song on earth.
In 1965, the Sherman brothers won 2 Academy Awards for Mary Poppins (1964), which includes the songs "Feed The Birds", "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and the Oscar winner, "Chim Chim Cher-ee". Since Mary Poppins (1964)' motion picture premiere, the Sherman brothers have subsequently earned nine Academy Award nominations, two Grammy Awards, four Grammy Award nominations, and an incredible 23 gold and platinum albums.
Robert and Richard worked directly for Walt Disney until his death in 1966. Since leaving the company, the brother songwriting team has worked freelance on scores of motion pictures, television shows, theme park exhibits and stage musicals. Their first non-Disney assignment came with Albert R. Broccoli's motion picture production Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), which garnered the brothers their third Academy Award nomination.
In 1973, the Sherman brothers made history by becoming the only Americans, ever, to win First Prize at the Moscow Film Festival for Tom Sawyer (1973). They also authored the screenplay for "Tom Sawyer".
In 1976, The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella (1976), was picked to be the Royal Command Performance of the year, and the event was attended by Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. A modern musical adaptation of the classic Cinderella story, "Slipper" also features both songscore and screenplay by the Sherman brothers. That same year, the Sherman brothers received their star on the Hollywood "Walk of Fame" directly across from Grauman's Chinese Theater. Their numerous other Disney and Non-Disney top box office film credits include The Jungle Book (1967), The Aristocats (1970), The Parent Trap (1961), Charlotte's Web (1973), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), Snoopy Come Home (1972), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), and Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989).
Outside the motion picture realm, their Tony-nominated smash hit, "Over Here!" (1974) was the biggest grossing original Broadway musical of that year. The Sherman brothers have also written numerous top selling songs including "You're Sixteen", which holds the distinction of reaching Billboard's #1 spot twice; first with Johnny Burnette in 1960 and, then, with Ringo Starr, fourteen years later. Other top-ten hits include "Pineapple Princess", "Let's Get Together", and more.
In 2000, the Sherman brothers wrote the song score for Disney's blockbuster film The Tigger Movie (2000). This film marked the brother's first major motion picture for the Disney company in over 28 years.
In 2002, "Chitty" hit the London stage and received rave revues. "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Stage Musical" is currently the most successful stage show ever produced at the London Palladium. In 2005, a second company will premiere on Broadway (New York City). The Sherman brothers wrote an additional six songs specifically for the new stage productions.
In 2003, four Sherman brothers' musicals ranked in the "Top 10 Favorite Children's Films of All Time" in a (British) nationwide poll reported by the BBC. The Jungle Book (1967) ranked at #7, Mary Poppins (1964) ranked at #8, The Aristocats (1970) ranked at #9 and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) topped the list at #1.
Richard Sherman resides in Beverly Hills, California with his wife, Elizabeth.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
David Raksin's father Isidore, who both conducted and owned a music store, taught his son to play piano as well as woodwind instruments at an early age. He eventually studied music with Arnold Schönberg, but became by-and-large a self-taught multi-instrumentalist (organ and percussion), as well as composer and arranger for radio and for his own jazz/dance combo which he led at the age of 12 ! In between classes at the University of Pennsylvania, he often worked gigs and jam sessions, playing clarinet. After graduation, he joined Benny Goodman for a while and then got his major break when the conductor Al Goodman bought his arrangement for 'I Got Rhythm'. Goodman pianist and famous wit, Oscar Levant, was impressed and recommended David to his lifelong friend George Gershwin, who in turn helped him to get a job with the publishing company Harms/Chappell.
At the behest of Alfred Newman, who was in charge of the 20th Century Fox music department, David was invited to Hollywood in 1935. His first assignment was as arranger (in conjunction with Edward B. Powell) of the musical score for the Charles Chaplin film Modern Times (1936), but the collaboration with the famous comedian was not an entirely happy experience. At one stage, David was fired after making a stand on improvements to the score, which Chaplin did not appreciate. He was reinstated only due to Alfred Newman's intercession but, ultimately, never received due credit for his input. Many of his other early Hollywood orchestrations suffered a similar fate. For several years, David worked on a variety of second features, often horror films, but occasionally broke out of the mold, as with the 'Polka Dot Ballet' written for The Gang's All Here (1943). The big career-changing breakthrough happened in 1944, when both Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann refused to score the Otto Preminger movie Laura (1944). Newman was already overloaded with assignments, and, in any case, rumours persisted at the studio, that this was the type of film unlikely to enhance a composer's reputation. Johnny Mercer and David Raksin eventually landed the job, the former writing the lyrics and David composing the score with the central theme being the romantic ballad 'Laura'.
This evocative, wonderfully haunting piece of music has since become one of the most often recorded in history and the only song Cole Porter admitted to being jealous of not having composed himself. It was also one of Frank Sinatra's personal favorites. However, the 'Laura' theme might have been stillborn if Preminger had gone with Gershwin's 'Summertime' or Duke Ellington's 'Sophisticated Lady', as he had intended to do at first. David stood his ground with the director (as he had previously with Chaplin and would later do with Alfred Hitchcock), arguing that these pieces were unsuitable for the film because "of the accretion of ideas and associations that a song already so well known would evoke in the audience". While he would always have his fair share of detractors, who thought his music too complex or too avant-garde, David Raksin was now on his way to becoming a significant film composer in Hollywood. His next memorable achievements were the score for the lavish costume drama Forever Amber (1947), with yet another haunting melodic leitmotif; the off-beat, almost expressionistic Force of Evil (1948), particularly the finale; the stirring theme for the all-star movie The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Later noteworthy efforts included Carrie (1952), Separate Tables (1958) and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962).
What set David Raksin apart from other film composers was his unmitigated willingness to experiment, to be creatively different. In so doing, he enhanced the impact of, and, in the long run, the reputation of many a motion picture. David also composed for the small screen (for instance, the theme for Ben Casey (1961)) and for the stage ('Volpone', 'Mother Courage', 'The Prodigal'). When not writing music or conducting, he lectured in music theory and technique at the University of Southern California and at UCLA (1958-2003). He served eight terms as president of the Composers & Lyricists Guild of America. He was awarded the Golden Soundtrack Award in 1992 by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
William Walton came from a musical family. He entered Christ Church, Oxford at the early age of sixteen but left without a degree in 1920. A fine musician, he was essentially self-taught as a composer, except some instruction from Hugh Allen, the cathedral organist. Through literary friends and other associations he became acquainted with the London music and cultural scene. In addition to his own genius for harmonies and texturing (as seen in early choral works), Walton was influenced by the works of Stravinsky, Sibelius, and jazz. The use of the latter brought some early snubbing as a modernist among conservative music critics. But during some lean years of the 1920s, Walton helped support himself playing piano at jazz clubs. But he devoted most time to composing (chamber, concerto, and vocal music) which paid off initially in 1929 with his Viola Concerto, putting him solidly in the British classical music scene. Through the 1930s his choral and symphonic works bolstered that reputation all the more.
His first ventures into film music were in association with the Hungarian émigré director/producer Paul Czinner. Walton did four scores for him, including Walton's first Shakespearean effort, As You Like It (1936) which starred Laurence Olivier. With the outbreak of World War II, Walton entered military service but was given leave to compose music for propaganda films based on his already proficient examples of ceremonial themes. One of these film tasks put him back in acquaintance with Olivier who was adapting Shakespeare's Henry V (1944). Having scored five war period films so far, this would be the first of three scores for Olivier's filmed Shakespeare plays. With its implied spirit of nationalism, the music ranged over rousing heroic sections to Renaissance dance and pastoral elements, so familiar to the public in the efforts of such older contemporaries as Ralph Vaughn Williams. The score was nominated for an Oscar, and it remains perhaps the best known of Walton's film music.
After the war Walton continued to be a public favorite, and though ranging over new projects in all composing areas, his post-Romantic sentiments would continue to be his foundation. Once again Olivier wanted a score, now for his Hamlet (1948). The music was appropriately subdued to reflect the nature of the play. The film was a landmark for the time and garnered four Oscars with Walton again being nominated for the score. He continued work on an opera (Troilus and Cressida, 1954) and his general musical output, which, all told, would surpass 75 works. Walton did no more film work until Olivier came knocking for the third and final time for a Shakespearean score. This time Walton's music for Richard III (1955) swelled with the facade of pomp that edges the play-repeating the main theme throughout-while keeping the nuances of treachery which dominates the play's content to dramatic economy. Although the film proved to be the most popular and perhaps influential of Olivier's trilogy, it received only one nomination as best picture.
The years following into the 1960s were challenging for Walton as composing became difficult and focused on recasting previous work. He scored the music for Battle of Britain (1969), but it was replaced only two weeks before the film was released. Walton composed his last big screen score-again for Olivier-this time for Three Sisters (1970).
Walton was knighted in 1951 and received the Order of Merit in 1968. But as fate will often have it, Walton was not finished with Shakespeare. Into the 1970s he was commissioned to do the music for twelve new productions of plays as part of the ambitious BBC effort "The Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (1978 thru 1985). Though his screen music output of some 28 scores was modest compared to that of Hollywood contemporaries (Steiner, Rozsa, and Newman, but similar to Korngold,), his brand of thematic delivery, a British twist as it were, departed from classic Hollywood scores with their continental Romantic traditions.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Born: February 5, 1902 in Warsaw, Poland Died: April 25, 1983 in Los Angeles, California, USA Kaper displayed musical talent as early as the age of seven when his family acquired a piano. His inclination to music led him to study both piano and composition, while also taking courses in law to satisfy his father. At twenty-one he graduated from The Chopin Music School. To continue his musical education he went to Berlin. In order to support himself during this period he began writing songs for a cabaret. Later he worked as an arranger and a composer for both stage and film productions. In 1933, as the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Kaper moved to Paris and worked in the French film industry. This phase of his career lasted only two years, for in 1935 MGM executive Louis B. Mayer was on vacation in Europe and happened to hear one of Kaper's songs. Mayer offered the composer a contract, and Kaper soon found himself working in Hollywood. One of his first efforts for MGM was the title tune for the film San Francisco (1936), a song which was so appealing to the American public that it became a standard. During his early years at MGM, the studio kept Kaper busy as a songwriter. But the composer looked for opportunities to write complete background scores. In the forties he did provide music for dramatic films such as Gaslight (1944), Green Dolphin Street (1947) and Act of Violence (1949). This last film, a disturbing thriller directed by Fred Zinneman, shows how sophisticated and daring Kaper's music could be. Drawing on his knowledge of modern composition, he was surprisingly successful at incorporating dissonant, abstract sounds into his film scores considering the conservative tastes that prevailed in Hollywood. But it is important to note that the composer always depended on others to orchestrate his work. Kaper wrote his scores at the piano. Then he would give what he'd written to an orchestrator and they would discuss how to expand on the piano reduction. In the fifties Kaper was given more opportunities to show his range. He created edgy, modern scores for films like Them! (1954) and rich, romantic scores for films like The Brothers Karamazov (1958), while still turning out catchy melodies for musicals like Lili (1953). By the end of the decade, though, it was clear that the Hollywood studios were in decline and that the days of in-house music departments were over. When the ax fell at MGM, Kaper went on working as a freelance film composer. One of his last major film assignments was Lord Jim (1965), an adaptation of the Conrad novel. To complement the epic scope of the film, Kaper used not only a large symphony orchestra but also many instruments indigenous to the story's Asian setting. Like most Hollywood composers of the studio era, Kaper found himself working on fewer movies during the sixties. His last credit on a theatrical release was A Flea in Her Ear (1968). Though he was later hired to work on The Salzburg Connection (1972), his score was discarded. Kaper died at his home in Los Angeles in 1983. by Casey Maddren Bibliography The Film Music of Bronislaw Kaper, notes by Tony Thomas, Delos Records, 1975 Variety, obituary, May 4, 1983 Interview with Pete Rugolo conducted by the author, 1998- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Ernest Gold was born on 13 July 1921 in Vienna, Austria. He was a composer, known for It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), Exodus (1960) and On the Beach (1959). He was married to Jeanette (Jan) Keller, Marni Nixon and Ruth Andree Golbin. He died on 17 March 1999 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
At the least George Auric was a fine musician, having been a child prodigy, but he was much more in the musical world. He studied under Vincent D'Indy (a devotee of Cesar Franck and the German school of symphonic composition) and attended the Paris Conservatory (1920). By the time he was 20 he had orchestrated and written incidental music for ballets and the stage. With some interest in the avant garde, he became a friend of Erik Satie and playwright Jean Cocteau and joined their friends, the musical group "Les Six", whose members were impressive: Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre (the only woman member), and Louis Durey. Auric moved into music criticism for a short time and then began composing for poetic and other textual formats from his Les Six associations. But his stylistic development would prove to be very classical in sympathy.
He especially continued his association with Cocteau who finally turned to films, and Auric turned to writing film scores. Their first collaboration was Cocteau's Blood of the Poet (1930). But Auric did the scores of many small format movies with other French directors through the 1930s and the war years. He was also interested in what the British were doing in film work. His first UK score was for Dead of Night (1945), a stylish horror film. The same year he also scored the Bernard Shaw comedic Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) with Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. The next year he scored perhaps his most famous musical partnership with Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast (1946). Auric's haunting, subdued music for the movie would be typical of his inventive style of transparent orchestration in which he might use only a few instruments at a time in a particular passage but eventually employ all the usual orchestral instrumentation in this progression to convey the whole of his score. Auric's music (here Stravinsky-like) provided the perfect atmospheric score for the eerie British horror classic The Queen of Spades (1949).
Auric's first American score very much displayed his depth in conveying the nuances of mood change in a story musically. This was the wonderful, bittersweet comedy Roman Holiday (1953), directed by William Wyler and introducing a vivacious Audrey Hepburn to the silver screen. On through the 1950s and into the 1960s Auric was very busy with scores predominately of French films but some notable British and American efforts as well. Among several for the English language were the charming American war drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) with Deborah Kerr and - with Kerr again - the spooky 'Henry James' novel ("Turn of the Screw") UK adaptation The Innocents (1961). For the remainder of the 1960s and sporadically in the mid 1970s, Auric did some additional scoring, mostly French TV, but he was busy elsewhere as of 1962 being director of Paris Opera. Providing a unique finesse to film music, George Auric contributed nearly 130 scores, placing him along side some of the most prolific of the contemporary Hollywood film composers.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Hans J. Salter was born on 14 January 1896 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]. He was a composer, known for Happy Death Day 2U (2019), Hubie Halloween (2020) and Detroit Rock City (1999). He was married to Gutzman. He died on 23 July 1994 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Brooklyn-born composer and orchestrator, who graduated from New York University at the age of eighteen. A child prodigy, he was already an accomplished pianist at the age of five and began composing music three years later. His first serious work ('Paeans') was performed in public when he was seventeen, conducted by the great Bernard Herrmann. Other orchestral compositions included 'Those Everlasting Blues' (1932) and 'Beguine' (1934), notable for his usage of traditional American folk idioms.
He wrote for many Broadway shows from 1935, beginning with 'Parade'. Moross also composed five ballets, of which 'Frankie and Johnny' (1938,for dancer Ruth Page) and 'The Golden Apple' (1954) were the most successful. The latter won the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, 1953-4. Moross worked in Hollywood from 1940 as composer/arranger, often in collaboration with Aaron Copland (eg. Our Town (1940)), Hugo Friedhofer and Franz Waxman. His own scores as film composer include The Proud Rebel (1958), The War Lord (1965) and Rachel, Rachel (1968). He was nominated for an Academy Award for his lush, sweeping score of The Big Country (1958). In addition to his film work, he was also active in composing music for television, his best work in the western series Gunsmoke (1955) and Wagon Train (1957). He created eight pieces of chamber music, 1964-78, and, his final work, the one-act opera 'Sorry, Wrong Number', based on Lucille Fletcher's famous thriller. Jerome Moross received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1947 and 1948.- Music Department
- Composer
- Art Director
Trained in classical music at Columbia University, Webb worked on Broadway by the time he was in his mid-20's, not only composing incidental music, but co-writing original plays with his older brother, the director Kenneth S. Webb. By 1923, he worked as conductor/arranger on hit shows like "Music Box Revue" and "Stepping Stones". Two years later, a collaboration with his illustrious peer Max Steiner led to a lasting friendship, as well as (by his own admission) profoundly influencing his own future career as a composer. At the end of the decade, Steiner, then head of the music department at RKO, persuaded Webb to accept an assignment in Hollywood, scoring the musical Rio Rita (1929).
Steiner remained in charge until his departure in 1935, when Webb effectively took his place, remaining a fixture at RKO until 1955. He often worked in conjunction with Bernard Herrmann and C. Bakaleinikoff, supervising, conducting and composing scores for literally hundreds of films. As a composer, his style was somewhat akin to that of Herbert Stothart, in that it was more subtle, less overtly dramatic, yet still perfectly integrated with the action, or imperceptibly underscoring the dialogue. A good example is the romantic violin-laden score for the sentimental drama The Enchanted Cottage (1945). The piano concerto from this film was performed later that year at the Hollywood Bowl.
Better still, were his understated, eerily effective horror themes, setting the mood for the films of Val Lewton, of which Cat People (1942) and The Body Snatcher (1945) are absolute standouts. Webb's other noteworthy contribution was in the field of thrillers and films noir, notably The Spiral Staircase (1946), Notorious (1946) and Out of the Past (1947). After RKO wound down, Webb free-lanced for several years, working variously at Warners, Paramount and for John Wayne's Batjac Productions. Though his entire collection of manuscripts was sadly lost in a house fire, copies of his scores from the RKO vaults have been preserved at UCLA.- Executive
- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Hugo Friedhofer -- how many times have you seen that name in the credits of 1930s and '40s movies for "orchestration" or "musical arranger" and thought -- Gee, what a busy guy! He was, and, ironically, much of that work went uncredited. He is not usually mentioned with the great film composers of early Hollywood, but he was very much an equal and as prolific once he received the opportunities to compose as well. Friedhofer began studying the cello at age 13. In 1917, he dropped out of high school in support of a teacher who had been fired for radical and anti-war beliefs. He worked as a cellist for the People's Symphony Orchestra in San Francisco (always a liberal kind of place). He married quite young at 19 and had a child by the age of 22. He quickly put his music expertise to a working life by playing in theater orchestras and accompanying silent films and stage shows between features. He also started writing arrangements of music and worked at the Granada Theater (became the Paramount in 1931), with the opportunity to write some incidental music.
Friedhofer came to Los Angeles in the later 1920s and became a friend of the violinist George Lipschultz, who just happened to be the musical director at Twentieth Century Fox. It was 1929, and Lipschultz asked him to fill in a musician spot for film music recording at a small studio. That was the beginning of Friedhofer's career in films. When this small studio was taken over by Fox, he and other musicians were on the street. But he was brought to the notice of Erich Korngold, a relatively new film composer at Warner Bros. where Max Steiner was king. Friedhofer was hired by Warner Bros soon after to arrange scores for musicals and orchestrate scores-mostly for these two composers. Including orchestrating all of Korngold's movie scores and fifty of Steiner's, Friedhofer would orchestrate or musically direct 105 films into the mid 1950s during his career.
But he was already doing significant film composing as well from 1930 along with incidental and stock music for several studios before his stay at Warner. Friedhofer's developing style was in the romantic vein of his contemporaries. He studied composition with Ernst Toch after aiding the composer with contributions to Peter Ibbetson (1935) at Paramount. With the move to Warner, Friedhofer's problem became being just too valuable as an orchestrator and musical director for Warner to free him for composing assignments until the late 1930s. With tight budgets and the need for musical managers to wear several hats, Friedhofer's legendary efficiency was hard to give up. His first full film score was for Samuel Goldwyn's The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938) after being recommended by another film composer great Alfred Newman. His first for Warner's was The Oklahoma Kid (1939) (with James Cagney debuting as a cowboy!). He did not get credit for this nor for The Mark of Zorro (1940) (co-work with Newman) and Santa Fe Trail (1940) both in 1940. Into and after the war years Friedhofer was very busy -- but still not getting the composing credit due -- as for Gilda (1946). All told, he was not credited as composer for some 120 films.
Friedhofer broke from the confines of Warner Bros. finally in 1946 to freelance and received the grand prize right off. Again, it was Newman who recommended him for scoring Goldwyn's wonderful post-war drama of adjustment The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Friedhofer showed his power as composer with a score that engaged the story at every turn and most deservedly won the Oscar for Best Score. Other memorable credited scores included such classics as: the gripping music for Lifeboat (1944), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; the delightful Christmas strings score of The Bishop's Wife (1947); and the soaring music for 'Ingrid Bergman' in Joan of Arc (1948).
Though he continued in demand, much of Friedhofer's scoring output through the 1950s went to films mostly relegated to Saturday mornings these days, but there were notables, as the 1957 duo An Affair to Remember (1957) and the well-received The Sun Also Rises (1957). And the next year came the engaging and thought-provoking The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958) (a fine performance by John Wayne) under the always versatile direction of John Huston. He also did some TV episodic and mini-movie music through the 1960s in addition to more films.
Friedhofer had all the qualities of an accomplished, indeed, incisive and intuitive film composer -- proved with a total of eight Oscar nominations -- and yet he was his own worst enemy. Anxieties about his abilities brought self-criticism and doubts that boiled out in a misanthropic view of the world in general that no amount of praise from public or friends could dislodge. At the least he should have believed that he had succeeded in grand style -- with nearly 250 pieces of screen music as a realistic basis for affirmation.- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Prokofiev was a multi-talented man and an innovative composer. He learned piano from his mother and chess from his father. He always had a chess set on his piano, and was able to play against the chess champions of his time. He studied music with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, graduated with highest marks from the St. Petersburg Conservatory (1914), and was rewarded with a grand piano. He emigrated from Russia after the revolution, and made successful concert tours in Europe and the U.S. In 1918 in New York he met Spanish singer Carolina Codina (Lina Llubera), they married in Paris, in 1923, and had two sons.
Prokofiev's radiant optimism and his childlike personality shines in his popular orchestral suite "Peter and the Wolf" and in the "Classical Symphony". His humorous irony and wit is popping up in piano pieces named "Sarcasms", also in his five piano concertos, ballets and film scores, all written in his instantly identifiable musical language. He wrote film scores for The Czar Wants to Sleep (1934), Alexander Nevsky (1938), Cinderella (1961), and the two-part Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944), directed by Sergei Eisenstein.
All of his music, that he created while outside of the Soviet Union, was sometimes criticized as cosmopolitan and anti-Soviet. Prokofiev divorced his wife in 1948. His ninth sonata, dedicated to Svyatoslav Richter, was welcomed warmly, but another official critic on his music and life started in 1948. He died in 1953, the same day of Joseph Stalin.- Music Department
- Composer
- Producer
Composer-pianist-arranger Johnny Green was born in Far Rockaway, New York. The son of musical parents, Green was accepted by Harvard at the age of 15, and entered the University in 1924. Between semesters, bandleader Guy Lombardo heard his Harvard Gold Coast Orchestra and hired him to create dance arrangements for his nationally famous orchestra. He gained a thorough education in music, history, economics, and government before returning to pursue a master's degree in the field of English literature. His father interrupted Johnny's education and forced him to become a stockbroker, and with great unhappiness, Johnny tried it for six months. His young bride Carol (to whom he dedicated Out of Nowhere) encouraged him to leave Wall Street and cultivate his many musical talents. She remarked, "We didn't have children, we had songs" (indeed, it was during his first marriage that most of his hit standards were composed, including "I Cover the Waterfront," You're Mine, You," "Easy Come, Easy Go," "Rain Rain Go Away" and "I Wanna Be Loved."). During the lean years, he arranged for dance orchestras, most notably Jean Goldkette on NBC. He was accompanist/arranger to stars such as James Melton, Libby Holman and Ethel Merman. It was while writing material for Gertrude Lawrence that he composed Body and Soul, the first recording of which was made by Jack Hylton and His Orchestra, eleven days before the song was copyrighted. 'Nathaniel Shilkret' and Paul Whiteman commissioned him to write larger works for orchestra, and he scored numerous films at Paramount's Astoria Studios. He conducted in East Coast theatres and toured vaudeville as musical director for Buddy Rogers. During his two-and-a-half years at Paramount Studios, he was able to learn more about arranging from veterans Adolph Deutsch and Frank Tours. In 1934, he returned from London, where he had composed a musical comedy for Jack Buchanan. At the age of 25, he had several hit songs under his belt. William Paley, the president of the Columbia Broadcasting System and an investor in New York's St. Regis Hotel, encouraged John W. Green to form what became known as Johnny Green, His Piano and Orchestra. (Green added, "My arm didn't need much twisting.") His orchestra made dance records for the Columbia and Brunswick companies, in a depressed era when record sales were inconsequential to a song's popularity. In 1935, Green starred on the Socony Sketchbook, sponsored by Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. He lured the young California songstress Virginia Verrill to headline with him on the Friday evening broadcasts. His "regular" cast of vocalists included former débutante Marjory Logan, Jimmy Farrell, and the four Eton Boys, all of whom appeared in films and on stage. Green's piano playing is intricate, and his musical ideas are exceedingly clever. Green was at the top of his field in New York, and he continued conducting on radio and in theatres into the 1940s, until he decided to move to Hollywood and make his mark in the film business. His credits as musical executive, arranger, conductor and composer are lengthy, but include such highlights as Raintree County (1957), Bathing Beauty (1944), Something in the Wind (1947), Easter Parade (1948) (Academy Award), Summer Stock (1950), An American in Paris (1951) (Academy Award), Royal Wedding (1951), High Society (1956) and West Side Story (1961) (Academy Award). Married three times, he had a daughter with actress Betty Furness and two daughters with MGM "Glamazon" Bunny Waters. He was a respected board member of ASCAP and guest conductor with symphonies around the globe, including the Hollywood Bowl, Denver Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and more. He was a chairman of the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and a producer of television specials.- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Born in Northampton on 21st October 1921, Malcolm Arnold studied composition with Gordon Jacob and trumpet with Ernest Hall at the Royal College of Music. In 1941 he joined the trumpet section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, becoming principal by 1943. After two years of war service and one season with the BBC Symphony Orchestra he returned to the LPO in 1946; but composition was already becoming his priority and he had already produced a catalogue of attractive works, an early example being the comedy overture Beckus the Dandipratt, Op.5 (1943), recorded in 1948 by the LPO under their principal conductor Eduard van Beinum. That same year Arnold won the Mendelssohn Scholarship which enabled him to spend a year in Italy; on his return he decided to concentrate entirely upon composition. His experience as an orchestral player stood him in good stead as a composer. He quickly built up a reputation as a fluent and versatile composer and a brilliant orchestrator, many commissions were to come his way. Arnold has written works in almost every genre for amateur and professional alike, including nine symphonies, five ballets, two operas, 20 concertos, overtures and orchestral dances, two string quartets and other chamber music, choral music, song cycles and works for wind and brass band. Somehow, in the midst of this prolific creativity, Arnold found time to score over 80 films including the Academy Award-winning score for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), written in only ten days and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) which brought an Ivor Novello Award.
Arnold's music springs directly from roots in dance and song. Typically it is lucid in texture, clear in draftsmanship. His lighter entertainment pieces are easy to listen to and rewarding to perform. As an inventor of tunes, his powers seem to be inexaustible, and he is prodigal with his gifts; the 'big tune' in the modest little Toy Symphony, for example, is just as much a winner as the many memorable themes in many concert works. Many of these are firmly established in the concert repertory. Yet for those who have ears to hear, his works frequently give more than a hint of a complex musical personality and of dramatic tensions not far below the surface. In fact there is scope in Arnold's music which reflects his profound concern with the human predicament and also in his belief that music is "a social act of communication among people, a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is."
In 1969 Malcolm Arnold was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth, he was awarded the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (C.B.E.) in 1970 and received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Exeter (1969), Durham (1982) and Leicester (1984). He was made a fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1983 and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music (R.A.M.). In 1986 he received the Ivor Novello Award for outstanding services to British music. He was Knighted in 1993. He died on September 23, 2006, after a brief illness.- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Aaron Copland is an Academy Award-winning composer (The Heiress (1949)), author, conductor, lecturer and educator. He was educated at public schools and was a music student of his sister and later Leopold Wolfson, Victor Wittgenstein, Clarence Adler, Rubin Goldmark and Nadia Boulanger. In 1925, he received the first Guggenheim fellowship awarded to a composer. He was a lecturer for ten years at the New School for Social Research, a guest lecturer at Harvard University between 1935 and 1944, and Dean of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood from 1946. With Roger Sessions, he organized the Copland-Sessions concert series for young American composers, and he founded the American Festival of Contemporary Music, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York. He was a conductor in the United States and abroad. As a guest conductor for the Boston Symphony, he toured with Charles Münch throughout the Far East in 1960. His memberships included the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the US Medal of Freedom.- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Rachel Portman, Composer
British composer Rachel Portman became the first female composer to win an Academy Award, which she received for the score of Emma. She was also the first female composer to win a Primetime Emmy Award, which she received for the film, Bessie. She has received two further Academy Nominations for The Cider House Rules and Chocolat, which also earned her a Golden Globe Nomination. Rachel was given an OBE in 2010 and is an honorary fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. She's also a Fellow of the Royal College of Music. Rachel has written stage and concert commissions including a musical of Little House on the Prairie, and an opera of Saint Exupery's, The Little Prince for Houston Grand Opera. For the BBC Proms, she wrote The Water Diviner, a dramatic choral symphony. She also wrote 'Endangered' performed at the World Environment Day Concert, at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing. Other works include Earth Song for the BBC Singers, a solo piano album Ask The River and most recently for Joyce Di Donato, The First Morning of the World as part of her Eden programme.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Ron Goodwin was born on 17th February 1925 in Plymouth. He was the son of a London policeman who was detached to the harbour-town. His mother felt that piano lessons would be a good pastime, so in his fifth year, the little Ron was hoisted onto a piano-stool and his education on this instrument began. Ron himself was at that time not really convinced about that parental ambition.
In 1934 his father's detachment ended and the family moved back to London. Ron went for his elementary education to the Willesden County Grammar school, situated in the North-West of London. In the school an orchestra was set-up and Ron got slowly attracted by music. It fascinated him, that all these young people were playing different instruments but that the result was very harmonious.
When he was 11, he went to his teacher and asked for a place in the orchestra. His teacher replied: "We don't have enough trumpet players. Learn how to play the trumpet and we'll see". That's what they call "Hobson's Choice". And so he learned to play the trumpet. Ready after just a few lessons, Ron joined the school orchestra. He kept continuing with his trumpet lessons because he felt that there was more prosperity in a career as a trumpet player than as a pianist. Moreover he had more fun in playing the trumpet. Nevertheless he also continued his piano lessons. The piano has always been a very useful instrument for him, when writing music. But frankly, he never became a virtuoso pianist. He was a much better trumpet player.
The end of the '30s was the era of swing with the great big bands of Glen Miller, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey and Woody Herman. In 1939, at the age of just 14, he formed his own dance band called "The Woodchoppers". Very soon the orchestra got some engagements here and there. The signature tune for their performances was "At the Woodchoppers Ball", a swinging Woody Herman composition. That explains the name "The Woodchoppers". The band was very soon semi-professional and very regularly entered competitions for dance bands.
After he had studied harmony and counterpoint, he left school in 1942. In deference to his mother's doubts about the security status and prospects of music as a career, he took a job as junior clerk in an insurance office. He held the job for three months. After repeatedly catching him fixing gigs for "The Woodchoppers" over the office 'phone, Ron's boss advised him to forget insurance and take his chances in music. He still thinks that this is the best advice ever given to him.
He started as a copyist for the music publisher Campbell Connelly. There he got the opportunity to work with and learn from Harry G. Stafford. This was an elderly thoroughly experienced arranger, who had arranged the music of Hubert Bath for Hitchcock's first English sound film Blackmail (1929) in 1929. Stafford taught him all the methods for producing arrangements and how to lay out a score. In that period he also studied a private course on how to conduct an orchestra with Siegfried de Chabot, a teacher at the Royal Music College.
After a few months working for Campbell Connelly, he applied for a job as an arranger for Norrie Paramor and Harry Gold. They were joint-proprietors of "The Paramor-Gold Orchestral Services" and they also had a jazz orchestra called "The Pieces of Eight". He was hired, although he thinks that it was not only because of his skills as an arranger. In that jazz orchestra there used to be an excellent trumpet player called Cyril Ellis. He was drafted for the Navy and so Paramor and Gold lacked a musician. Goodwin, being a trumpet player, replaced Cyril in the orchestra and was also the arranger of the "Paramor-Gold Orchestral Services".
As an arranger he was particularly working for a BBC program called "Composers Cavalcade". Every week a different well-known composer of light music, like Albert Ketelby, Noël Coward or Ivor Novello was chosen. Goodwin provided all the arrangements for these weekly broadcasts and he got a lot of experience through it. In the meantime his band, "The Woodchoppers", won several Dance Band competitions and in 1945 came fifth in the All Britain Dance Band Championship.
After the contract with Norrie Paramor ended, he started working for the music-publisher Edward Kassner. Here he arranged the music for various types of orchestras. One day a pub or dance orchestra, the other day for BBC radio orchestras. In the meantime he also did the orchestrations for well-know orchestra leaders like Stanley Black, Ted Heath, Geraldo, Peter Yorke and Ambrose.
In 1949 he started working for Polygon. In those days the record market was dominated by two giants: Decca and EMI. Polygon was the brainchild of Alan Freeman (not to be confused with the D.J. of the same name). He also continued working or the Kassner Music Company as a manager/publisher and he was determined to fulfil his greatest wish - making records. He already had some contacts in Australia who wanted pop records and he decided to have these sung by Petula Clark. Petula was born on 15 November 1932 as Sally Clark. From her seventh year she had been singing regularly and had become a popular child-star through her radio performances during World War II. In 1944, when she was 11, she signed a film contract for the Rank Organisation. Despite her popularity neither Decca nor EMI were willing to give her a contract. Alan Freeman approached Leslie Clark, Petula's father who was also her manager. Leslie Clark took up the opportunity, invested also some money and Polygon was born.
At the end of 1949 the first recording session took place. That day four titles were recorded: "You go to My Head", "Out of a Clear Blue Sky", "Music! Music! Music!" ("Put Another Nickel in...") and "Blossoms on the Bough", featuring Petula Clark and the Stargazers with accompaniment conducted by Ron Goodwin. He was then just 24 years old. The 2 records were released in Australia and became a big success there. In 1950 "Too Young" was recorded, a cover version of Nat King Cole's USA no. 1 hit, sung by the then completely unknown singer/pianist, Jimmy Young, with accompaniment conducted by Ron Goodwin. The record became a big hit and gave a huge impulse to the careers of both Jimmy Young and Ron Goodwin. After that, Ron also recorded his first two instrumental records.
Polygon was not able to handle the enormous success of Jimmy Young and by the end of 1952 he moved to Decca. Ron Goodwin already had his contract with Parlophone, but on the Decca label he conducted fifteen Jimmy Young records. Ron Goodwin was still very young and the producer Dickie Rowe called him Ronnie Goodwin on the first of those Decca records. It did not go so well with Polygon after that. The company was not able to make up for the loss of Jimmy Young. Petula proved to be their only continuing asset and in 1955 Polygon was amalgamated with (Pye) Nixa.
In the slipstream of the success of "Too Young" Ron Goodwin was from then on an established name in the British musical world, performing under the name: "Ron Goodwin and his Orchestra" or depending on the mood of the person in charge of the marketing: "Ron Goodwin and his Concert Orchestra". The orchestra he formed consisted at first of 36 persons but later it grew to 42. All of them were session musicians personally selected by him. These musicians worked for him only during the record sessions. A day later they could be working for, for instance, Mantovani or Geraldo. Indeed, the Mantovani orchestra was also comprised entirely of session musicians.
In 1951 Ron Goodwin met George Martin, who was at that time a young assistant recording manager at Parlophone. George offered him a contract of backings for 12 vocal singles and 6 singles with his own orchestra every year. His first instrumental record on Parlophone was released in 1953. In that same year he recorded his version of Charles Chaplin's "Limelight" and reached third place in the English hit parade with it.
In the following years he made numerous records with his orchestra and did the vocal backings of, amongst others: Eamonn Andrews, Joan Baxter, Christine Campbell, Petula Clark, Jim Dale, Bruce Forsyth, Nadia Gray, The Headliners, Edmund Hockridge, Dick James, Cynthia Lanagan, Zack Laurence, Lorne Lesley, Larry Marschall, Glen Mason, Spike Milligan, Morecambe & Wise, Parlophone Pops Orchestra, Rostal & Schaefer, Edna Savage, Peter Sellers, Joan Small, Ian Wallace, Alma Warren and Jimmy Young.
Nowadays, many of those names are not familiar any more to us, but in those days you could find them regularly in the hit parades. Jim Dale started as a rock-singer, but became later a comedian and a member of the cast of the "Carry on..." films. Dick James started his own publishing company and became later the publisher of all the Beatles hits. And Edmund Hockridge? He still has his own fan club.
In 1954 Ron Goodwin recorded his first album in his own right: "Film Favourites". After that followed many more LPs, also 2 oriental: "Music for an Arabian Night" and "Holiday in Beirut". Long before he recorded "Sergeant Pepper ....." with The Beatles, George Martin was the producer of many concept-albums. A perfect example is the Goodwin album "Out of this World". On this LP the galaxy is traversed in an orchestral way (without the use of synthesisers!). Released in 1958, a few months after the first satellite "Sputnik" was put into orbit. Photos of launched rockets were not available yet, so the rocket on the front cover is a drawn one.
In 1958 the skiffle-rhythm was a rage and Goodwin wrote "Skiffling Strings". The song entered the hit parade and the American label "Capitol" was interested to release it in the USA. But the Americans were wondering what "Skiffling" really meant. In America the skiffle-rage was completely unknown. So, the song was re-titled "Swingin' Sweethearts". Ron Goodwin and George Martin went to the States to promote the single in several television-broadcasts. Within 14 days the song entered the American hit parades and was later followed by "Lingering Lovers". Quite a number of his albums were released after that in the USA. In that year he received the Ivor Novello Award" for "Lingering Lovers" as the year's best English song.
Peter Sellers was already a well-known actor in Britain, especially because of his performances in the BBC broadcasting series "The Goon Show". In 1958, 1959 and 1960 he recorded three LPs. These albums are still considered as the standard for British comedy. The production of those albums was again in the hands of George Martin. Ron Goodwin did all the conducting of the accompanying music. The third album in the series was called: "Peter and Sophia". In 1960, Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren had just finished the shooting of the film The Millionairess (1960). In this film Sellers played an Indian doctor, who was waylaid by an enamoured Sophia Loren. The co-operation of both led to this album, on which they both did the song "Goodness Gracious Me!". The song became a massive hit and remained in the top 5 for weeks. For the recording of the album Sophia Loren was flown to London with her husband Carlo Ponti, where he met Ron Goodwin. In 1965 they renewed their acquaintance when Carlo Ponti produced the film Operation Crossbow (1965) and Ron Goodwin wrote the music.
Back in 1955, Ron Goodwin was involved for the first time in composing film music. Malcolm Arnold (of "Bridge on the River Kwai" fame) had written the score for the film The Night My Number Came Up (1955). The producer wanted several sequences with dance music in night club style. Arnold refused to write this music and so Ron Goodwin was asked to write these sequences. In the following years he wrote the music for several documentaries. 1956: "The Corrington Achievement" and in 1957 "Atlantic Line". They appear to be the exercises for the larger jobs.
In 1958 he met Lawrence P. Bachmann, at that time manager for Columbia Pictures in London. Bachmann had written a book and this was going to be filmed with the title Whirlpool (1959). He commissioned Ron Goodwin to write the music for this film. That was Goodwin's first contact with a feature film. A year later Bachmann became head of production of MGM-Europe. He liked the music Goodwin wrote for his film "Whirlpool" very much and he asked him to write the music for 4 or 5 films every year. The first of those was Village of the Damned (1960), still one of the best British science fiction films. This was followed by the very successful Miss Marple film-series featuring Margaret Rutherford.
Because he was so busy writing film music, there was no more time left for vocal backings and his contract as musical-director for Parlophone was not prolonged. For the time being, the last album he recorded was "Serenade", which contained his well-known version of "Elizabethan Serenade".
Films he scored in the early sixties included: Invasion Quartet (1961), Postman's Knock (1962) (with a hilarious vocal from Spike Milligan), The Day of the Triffids (1963), Kill or Cure (1962), Follow the Boys (1963) (featuring Connie Francis) and Sword of Lancelot (1963). These were followed in 1964 by the United Artists/Mirisch Corporation film 633 Squadron (1964). This score established Ron Goodwin on the international stage as a composer of film music. The main theme became one of his most well-known and for the past several years has been used as a sort of signature tune at the start of the Rotterdam Marathon to accompany and encourage the athletes. After that film there followed even more film scores of which the most well-known are: Of Human Bondage (1964), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes (1965), Operation Crossbow (1965), The Trap (1966) (the theme from which was adopted by the BBC for their coverage of The London Marathon), Where Eagles Dare (1968), Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (1969), Battle of Britain (1969), Frenzy (1972) - when he replaced a score by Henry Mancini - and Force 10 from Navarone (1978).
In 1969, a very awkward situation existed with Battle of Britain (1969). Originally Sir William Walton wrote the music for this film. The producers were not really satisfied with the music and they gave the assignment to Goodwin. Sir William Walton is a kind of an institution and there was a lot of commotion about it. But Ron Goodwin was not to blame that he was signed to do the score. That Goodwin's score was apparently better, is simply proved by the fact that it was accepted by the producers. Apart, that is, from the fact that they liked Walton's "Battle in the Air" sequence more than Goodwin's and this is used in the film. These things can happen if one can choose. And so, nobody was happy with the situation, not Walton and not Goodwin.
In "Battle of Britain" it was very important that the audience could constantly identify the combatants. Ron Goodwin therefore wrote a march for the German Luftwaffe which he called, yes indeed, "Luftwaffe March". A few years later, one of the Bands of the Royal Airforce was going to record an album with marches, including "Luftwaffe March". A march with that name, recorded by an RAF Band already existed, therefore the march was re-titled "Aces High". The first editions of the soundtrack album mention the title "Luftwaffe march". On the later re-issues the new title "Aces High" was used.
In 1966 he resumed recording again for EMI, of both his own compositions and those of others. Now in the famous "Studio 2" stereo series, first came "Adventure", followed by "Gypsy Fire", "Christmas Wonderland", "Legend of the Glass Mountain", "Excitement", "Spellbound" and many others. By 1975, over a million of these albums with "Ron Goodwin and his (Concert) orchestra" had been sold and he received a gold record from EMI.
In 1979 Goodwin recorded "The Beatles Concerto". For collectors of Beatles and related records this is a very interesting LP. It was not the umpteenth album with a medley of tunes by Lennon-McCartney-Harrison, but contains a number of Beatle songs, arranged in a classical form and performed by England's most talented concert-pianists: Peter Rostal and Paul Schaefer. These were accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The record was produced by Beatles producer George Martin. Anyone who loves the great piano concertos of Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky will be impressed by "The Beatles Concerto". The sleeve with a fantastic full-colour inner sleeve with photos of the recording sessions is a gem. There were over 100,000 copies of the album sold. And still is there a demand for it.
The last film he scored, was the Danish animated feature Valhalla (1986). The soundtrack album was only released in Scandinavia and that is really a pity. The released soundtracks of Goodwin's animation-scores were more or less fairytale records for children: narration with background music and songs. But that is not the case with "Valhalla". This is a fantastic symphonic score, without the many songs which seems to be obligatory in all animation films. This music would perfectly fit a live-motion film, it is full of fresh and new elements. Maybe this is also a result of synergy, because he wrote this score in collaboration with the Dane, Bent Hesselmann.
In 1979 the City Fathers of his native town Plymouth invited him to compose a Suite for the commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the Globe. The vicinity of the Atlantic and the atmosphere of a harbour-town in his childhood years, probably had their influence on this Suite.
The influence of his lengthy stay in hit parade environments and his accompaniments of various pop artistes are audible in several scores. For instance That Riviera Touch (1966) and Kill or Cure (1962) are really swinging numbers. A problem for Goodwin was that his best scores were made in a period when film producers were not particularly interested in releasing a soundtrack, so many of them failed to get a release.
In 1970 Ron Goodwin was invited by the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to conduct a programme of his film music. To ease the tension between items, he improvised and told the audience some remarks and anecdotes about the performed pieces. They started to laugh. It turned out to be the turning point in his career. The idea was born to bring in concert a mixture of film and light music and the items melt together with a touch of humour. Within a few months a tour was organized and he toured constantly with different well-known Symphony orchestras all over the world, always playing to a full house. The orchestras he toured with included: The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, The Odense Symphony Orchestra, The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, The Denver Symphony Orchestra and The Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Ron Goodwin has scored approximately 70 films, there are between 70 and 80 albums released of his music and he recorded and accompanied on 250-350 singles. Films of the type like "Where Eagles Dare", "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" and "Monte Carlo or Bust", to which the music of Ron Goodwin makes a great contribution, are not being made anymore. And that is unfortunate in two ways: firstly, because we will not see those kind of films anymore and secondly, because we will not hear that kind of music anymore!- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
David Arnold was born on 23 January 1962 in Luton, England, UK. He is a composer and actor, known for Casino Royale (2006), Independence Day (1996) and Godzilla (1998). He has been married to Ellie Pole since 8 June 1996. They have three children.- Sound Department
- Editorial Department
- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
George Fenton was born on 19 October 1949 in Bromley, Kent, England, UK. He is a composer and actor, known for Groundhog Day (1993), Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998) and The Bounty Hunter (2010).- Additional Crew
- Composer
- Music Department
John Corigliano was born on 16 February 1938 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a composer, known for The Red Violin (1998), Altered States (1980) and Revolution (1985).- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
David Shire was born on 3 July 1937 in Buffalo, New York, USA. He is a composer and writer, known for Zodiac (2007), Short Circuit (1986) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). He has been married to Didi Conn since 11 February 1984. They have one child. He was previously married to Talia Shire.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Music Department
Nat King Cole was born Nathaniel Adams Coles (he later dropped the "s" in his surname) in Montgomery, Alabama. He received music lessons from his mother and his family moved to Chicago when he was only five, where his father, Edward James Coles, was a minister at the True Light Baptist Church and later Pastor of the First Baptist Church. At 12, he was playing the church organ. At age 14, he formed a 14 piece band called the Royal Dukes. Nat was a top flight sandlot baseball player at Wendell Phillips high school in Chicago.
His three brothers, Ike, Frankie, and Eddie Cole, also played the piano and sang professionally. Nat was an above-average football player in high school. His sister, Evelyn Cole, was a beautician in nearby Waukegan, Illinois. In 1939 he formed the King Cole Trio after his publicist put a silver tin-foiled crown on his head and proclaimed him "King". He later toured Europe and made a command performance before Queen Elizabeth II.
He had a highly-rated TV show in the 1950s but it was canceled (by Cole himself) as no companies could be found that were willing to sponsor the show. He was a big baseball fan and had a permanent box seat at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. He met his wife Maria Cole (a big-band singer) at the Zanzibar nightclub in Los Angeles through Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson show. Her parents opposed her decision to marry Cole, claiming he was "too black". They married, nonetheless, in 1948, and had two daughters, Caroline and Natalie Cole. On April 10, 1956, at Birmingham, Alabama, he was attacked by six white men from a white supremacist group called the White Cizizens Council during a concert and sustained minor injuries to his back. Cole appeared in several movies, the last of which was Cat Ballou (1965), starring Lee Marvin.
Cole received 28 gold record awards for such hits as "Sweet Lorraine", "Ramblin' Rose" in 1962, "Too Young" in 1951, "Mona Lisa" in 1949 and Mel Tormé's "Christmas Song". His first recordings of the Christmas Song included the lyrics, "Reindeers really know how to fly" instead of "reindeer really know how to fly", a mistake later corrected by Capitol Records. He was also a composer and his song "Straighten Up and Fly Right" was sold for $50.00. A heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Music Department
Louis Armstrong grew up poor in a single-parent household. He was 13 when he celebrated the New Year by running out on the street and firing a pistol that belonged to the current man in his mother's life. At the Colored Waifs Home for Boys, he learned to play the bugle and the clarinet and joined the home's brass band. They played at socials, picnics and funerals for a small fee. At 18 he got a job in the Kid Ory Band in New Orleans. Four years later, in 1922, he went to Chicago, where he played second coronet in the Creole Jazz Band. He made his first recordings with that band in 1923. In 1929 Armstrong appeared on Broadway in "Hot Chocolates", in which he introduced Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin', his first popular song hit. He made a tour of Europe in 1932. During a command performance for King George V, he forgot he had been told that performers were not to refer to members of the royal family while playing for them. Just before picking up his trumpet for a really hot number, he announced: "This one's for you, Rex."- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Composer ("It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing", "Sophisticated Lady", "Mood Indigo", "Solitude", "In a Mellotone", "Satin Doll"), pianist and conductor, holder of an honorary music degree from Wilberforce University and an LHD from Milton College, Duke Ellington led his own orchestra by 1918, and came to New York in 1923, appearing at the Cotton Club between 1927 and 1932. Making his first European tour in 1933, he followed with his annual Carnegie Hall concerts between 1943 and 1950, and then a Middle East tour (under the auspices of the State Department), including an appearance at the International Fair in Damascus in 1963. His stage scores include "Jump for Joy" and "Beggars Holiday" (Broadway). He made many records.
Joining ASCAP in 1953, his chief musical collaborators included Billy Strayhorn, Irving Mills, Mitchell Parish, Mann Curtis, Barney Bigard, Henry Nemo , Bob Russell, Don George, Lee Gaines , Paul Francis Webster, Edgar De Lange, Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Juan Tizol and his own son, Mercer Ellington. His other popular song and instrumental compositions include "Blind Man's Buff", "Creole Love Call", "Black and Tan Fantasy", "I Let a Song Go Out of my Heart", "Rockin' in Rhythm", "Caravan", "Pyramid", "Creole Rhapsody", "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good", "I'm Beginning to See the Light", "In a Sentimental Mood", "East St. Louis Toodle-oo", "Birmingham Breakdown", "Black Beauty", "Flaming Youth", "Awful Sad", "The Duke Steps Out", "Saturday Night Function", "Old Man Blues", "Ring Dem Bells", "Drop Me Off in Harlem", "Daybreak Express", "Delta Serenade", "Reminiscing in Tempo", "In a Jam", "Clarinet Lament", "Echoes of Harlem", "Dusk on the Desert", "Lost in Meditation", "Blue Reverie", "I've Got to Be a Rug Cutter", "Please Forgive Me", "Chatterbox", "Harmony in Harlem", "If You Were in My Place", "Skronch", "Braggin' in Brass", "Blue Light", "Buffet Flat", "The Gal from Joe's", "Subtle Lament", "Old King Dooji", "Boy Meets Horn", "Stevedore's Serenade", "You Gave Me the Gate and I'm Swinging", "Grievin'", "The Sergeant Was Shy", "Tootin' Through the Roof", "Rumpus in Richmond", "Jack the Bear", "Me and You", "Flaming Sword", "Harlem Air Shaft", "Bojangles", "Portrait of Bert Williams", "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me" (Concerto for Cootie), "Kind of Moody" (Serenade to Sweden), "Morning Glory", "Blue Goose", "Cotton Tail", "Conga Brava", "Chocolate Shake", "Rocks in My Bed", "San Juan Hill", "Crescendo in Blue", "Diminuendo in Blue", "Dusk", "C Jam Blues", "Main Stem", "I Didn't Know About You", "Just a-Sittin' and a-Rockin'", "Jazz Convulsions", "I'm Just a Lucky So and So", "The Blues", "Come Sunday", "Magenta Haze", "Just Squeeze Me", "Happy-Go-Lucky Local", "Takle Love Easy", "Tomorrow Mountain", "I'm Gonna Go Fishin'", "Money Jungle", "Prelude to a Kiss", "Jump for Joy", "I'm Checking Out, Goom-Bye", "The Mooche", "Warm Valley", "Blue Serge", "I Wish I Was Back in My Baby's Arms", "Lament for a Lost Love", "It Shouldn't Happen to a Dream", "Afro-Bosso", "In the Beginning, God" and "Christmas Surprise".- Music Artist
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Burl Ives was one of six children born to a farming family in Hunt City, Jasper, Illinois, the son of Cordellia "Dellie" (White) and Levi Franklin Ives. He first sang in public for a soldiers' reunion when he was age 4. In high school, he learned the banjo and played fullback, intending to become a football coach when he enrolled at Eastern Illinois State Teacher's College in 1927. He dropped out in 1930 and wandered, hitching rides, doing odd jobs, street singing.
Summer stock in the late 1930s led to a job with CBS radio in 1940; through his "Wayfaring Stranger" he popularized many of the folk songs he had collected in his travels. By the 1960s, he had hits on both popular and country charts. He recorded over 30 albums for Decca and another dozen for Columbia. In 1964 he was singer-narrator of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), an often-repeated Christmas television special. His Broadway debut was in 1938, though he is best remembered for creating the role of Big Daddy in the 1950s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) when it ran on Broadway through the early 1950s.
His four-decade, 30+ movie career began with Ives playing a singing cowboy in Smoky (1946) and reached its peak with (again) his role as Big Daddy role in the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and winning an Oscar for best supporting actor in The Big Country (1958), both in 1958. Ives officially retired from show business on his 80th birthday in 1989 and settled in Anacortes, Washington, although he continued to do frequent benefit performances at his own request. Burl Ives died in 1995.- Actor
- Music Department
- Director
Bandleader, songwriter ("Minnie the Moocher", "Are You Hep to That Jive?"), composer, singer, actor and author, educated at Crane College. While studying law, he sang with the band The Alabamians, and took over the group in 1928. He led The Missourians orchestra, then organized and led his own orchestra, playing at hotels, theaters and nightclubs throughout the US, and making many records. He joined the cast of the touring company of "Porgy and Bess", which performed across the USA and Europe between 1952 and 1954. When that ended, he founded a quartet. Joining ASCAP in 1942, he collaborated musically with Jack Palmer, Buck Ram, Andy Gibson, Clarence Gaskill, Irving Mills and Paul Mills . His other popular song compositions include "Lady With the Fan", "Zaz Zuh Zaz", "Chinese Rhythm", "Are You In Love With Me Again?", "That Man's Here Again", "Peck-A-Doodle-Doo", "I Like Music", "Rustle of Swing", "Three Swings and Out", "The Jumpin' Jive", "Boog It", "Come on with the Come-on", "Silly Old Moon", "Sunset", "Rhapsody in Rhumba", "Are You All Reet?", "Hi-De-Ho Man", "Levee Lullaby", "Let's Go, Joe", "Geechy Joe", and "Hot Air".- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Charles Christopher Parker Jr. was born on August 29, 1920, in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, to Charles Parker Sr. and his 18-year-old wife Addie. His father ran out on the family when Charlie was just a little boy. When he was 11 his mother bought him an alto saxophone for his birthday. By the time he was 15 Charlie was working as a musician in the flourishing Kansas City jazz scene. He also began drinking heavily and using drugs, which were also a part of the KC jazz scene, as were illegal after-hours gambling casinos.
Charlie became more experienced by playing with various bands, including those of Lawrence Keyes and Harlan Leonard, before joining Jay McShann's band in 1940. The band was widely heard on radio across the country, so Charlie's saxophone playing became well known, even though people didn't know his name, so he became known as the Yardbird, or just The Bird. While still in Kansas City, Charlie reached a breakthrough: tired of playing solo with the same scales, he discovered that if he used a higher interval of the chords from a popular song or melody line, with a pianist or guitarist adding the appropriate new chords, he finally could play the sound he always had been hearing in his head. Essentially turning the melody line inside out, he began experimenting with this new style, which became known as "bebop".
Charlie played with McShann in New York City until 1942, when he left for brief stints with the bands of pianist Earl 'Fatha' Hines and singer Billy Eckstine. The association with the Hines Orchestra was a significant one because of the other musicians, who included trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. By 1945 Charlie was back in New York and leading his own small groups. He got married, but continued to live like a nomad, traveling from place to place and spending almost every other night in a hotel or boarding house. He also became a drug addict, and as his addiction increased so did his appetite, and he began putting on weight.
Charlie took part in the first bebop recording session in 1945. With Gillespie and Miles Davis, he recorded songs like "Billie's Bounce" and "Koko" for Savoy Records. Not long afterward, he recorded such classic songs as "A Night in Tunisia" and "Yardbird Suite" for another small label, Dial Records. In the late 1940s Charlie toured Europe, where he was received like visiting royalty. He made several tours of Cuba, where he began experimenting with large string sections and Afro-Cuban rhythms. After a few years of relative stability, however, Charlie began a downward slide. He got hooked back on drugs again (heroin was his favorite), he began nodding out on bandstands, getting into fistfights and pawning his saxophones for drug money. Aware of the effects of drug use, he chastised younger sax players who emulated his heroin use.
By the early 1950s Charlie's drinking and drug use made him gray and prematurely lined. His self-abuse began to infringe on his musical ability. During this time, Charlie was befriended by a wealthy European baroness who was living in New York, loved his jazz music and helped him out when he needed it. In early 1955, on his way to a gig in Boston, Charlie stopped by her apartment for a visit. Alarmed by his obvious ill health, she had her personal doctor examine him, which revealed that he had stomach ulcers and many other health problems, the result of his years of drinking and drug use. The doctor recommended hospitalization, but the stubborn Charlie refused to consider it. The baroness got him to rest at her place for a few days.
On March 12, 1955, the baroness found Charlie Parker dead, slumped over in an easy chair in front of the TV set in her apartment. He was 34 years old. An autopsy revealed such damage to the inside of his body that the doctor who performed the autopsy thought Charlie was a man at least 50 years old. Charlie Parker's legend grew even larger after his death. Fans scrawled "Bird Lives!" on walls of jazz clubs from New York, to Los Angeles, to Paris, France. To this day, more than 40 years after his death, Bird remains jazz's single most venerated figure.- Music Department
- Soundtrack
A.P. Carter was born on 15 December 1891 in Maces Springs, Scott County, Virginia, USA. He is known for 2012 (2009), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Pitch Perfect (2012). He was married to Sara Dougherty. He died on 7 November 1960 in Kingsport, Tennessee, USA.- Actor
- Music Department
- Composer
The King of Swing! Famed clarinetist, composer ("Stompin' at the Savoy") and conductor, educated at the Lewis Institute in Chicago and a student of Schillinger and Schoepp. He was a clarinetist with the orchestras of Bix Beiderbecke, Jules Herbuveaux, Arnold Johnson and Ben Pollack, and also played in Broadway theater orchestras. He began to lead his own orchestras in 1934 at the Billy Rose Music Hall, then conducted the orchestra on the weekly radio program "Let's Dance" in 1934-1935, and played at numerous hotels, colleges and theaters. Expanding his musical efforts, he performed in chamber music concerts, later touring throughout the US, Europe, the Far East, South America and the USSR and made many recordings. Joining ASCAP in 1945, his chief musical collaborators included Count Basie, Harry James, Mitchell Parish, Andy Razaf, Edgar M. Sampson, Chick Webb, and Teddy Wilson. Some of his other popular songs and instrumental compositions include "Lullaby in Rhythm," "Don't Be That Way," "Seven Come Eleven," "Flying Home," "Two O'Clock Jump," "Air Mail Special," "Dizzy Spells," "If Dreams Come True," "Georgia Jubilee," "Four Once More," and "The Kingdom of Swing".- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Alton Glenn Miller was born on March 1, 1904, in Clarinda, Iowa; the son of Lewis Elmer and Mattie Lou Cavender Miller. He started his music studies when his father gave him a mandolin. He soon traded the mandolin for an old horn. In 1916 he switched to trombone. In 1923, he enrolled in the University of Colorado, but after a year, he dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles, where he joined Ben Pollack's band. He spent most of his time playing gigs and attending auditions.
In 1928, Miller moved to New York, where he played session gigs and made orchestrations. At that time he studied with the Russian musician and mathematician Joseph Schillinger, whose star apprentice was George Gershwin. Miller took Schillinger's instruction on orchestration of a practice exercise, which he developed into the song "Moonlight Serenade", making a small fortune with it. In 1934, Miller joined the Dorsey Brothers' Orchestra for a year, then organized an American band for Ray Noble, and made his debut at the Rainbow Room in New York's Rockefeller Center. The special sound of his band was developed in Miller's orchestration by using the "crystal chorus" and other inventive ways of arrangement.
Miller recorded his own band first time for Columbia Records on April 25, 1935. His instrumental "Solo Hop" reached the Top Ten in 1935, but he did not organize an orchestra under his own name until March of 1937. That band ultimately failed, and in 1938 he reorganized with many different musicians. In 1939, Miller and his new band got an engagement at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, NY, which was a major spot with a radio wire. In 1939, he scored seventeen Top Ten hits, including such songs, as "Sunrise Serenade", "Moonlight Serenade", "Stairway to the Stars", "Moon Love", "Over the Rainbow", "Blue Orchids", "The Man With the Mandolin", and other popular songs, which he composed or orchestrated. Miller scored 31 Top Ten hits in the year 1940, and another 11 Top Ten hits in 1941.
His number one hits included "Song of the Volga Boatmen", "You and I", "Chattanooga Choo Choo", from his first film, 'Sun Valley Serenade'. Miller worked with the vocalists Tex Beneke, Ray Eberle, and the Modernaires with Paula Kelly. On February 10, 1942, Miller was presented with the first ever "Gold record" for "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and scored another 11 Top Ten hits in 1942. That was the first full year of his country's participation in the Second World War.
Although he was well beyond draft age Miller still strongly wanted to use his talents to help the war effort. After being turned down for a Navy commission he applied to the Army and was accepted with the rank of Captain. On September 27, 1942 he gave his last performance as a civilian. The Army assigned him to the Army Air Forces at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He first organized a marching band, then built a large dance band with over two dozen jazz players and 21 string musicians. From January 1943 to June 1944 the Glenn Miller AAF Band made hundreds of live performances, "I Sustain the Wings" radio broadcasts, while previously-unreleased recordings by the former civilian band scored another 10 Top Ten hits in the year 1943. Miller took his band to Britain in June 1944. There he performed for the allied troops and did radio shows. His last recording of 20 new songs was made weeks before his death; it was released only in 1995.
After the liberation of France, now-Major Glenn Miller wanted to bring his music closer to the troops serving on the Continent and arranged to have the band transferred to Paris. He planned to travel ahead of time to prepare for the full orchestra's arrival but bad weather delayed his flight. On December 15, 1944 he accepted an invitation from another officer who was going to Paris on what turned out to be an unauthorized flight. He apparently was unaware that the plane's pilot was inexperienced in winter flying, and more tragically, that the small UC-64 "Norseman" transport had been suffering from fuel-system problems.
The plane never arrived in Paris, and on December 24, 1944 the AAF officially reported it and its crew as MIA (Missing in Action), under the presumption that it had gone down in the English Channel. In 1985, the British Ministry of Defence came up with explanation of Miller's disappearance, claiming that his plane was struck by a British bomb dropped in the waters by returning RAF pilots. Subsequent research has given credence to the alternate hypothesis that the plane crashed due to icing of its fuel system in the cold air over the Channel. However no wreckage, remains, or IDs have ever been found, precluding any definitive explanation. Glenn Miller was eventually officially declared dead; at his daughter's request a memorial tombstone was placed in Memorial Section H, Number 464-A on Wilson Drive in Arlington National Cemetery in April of 1992,- Actor
- Soundtrack
Tommy Dorsey was born on November 19, 1905 in Mahanoy Plane, Pennsylvania, USA. He was a musician and a bandleader, whose music appeared in such films as Annie Hall (1977), Ship Ahoy (1942) and The Human Stain (2003). He also occasionally appeared as himself, frequently with his band, in a variety of films. He was previously married to Jane Karl New, Patricia Dane and Mildred Ann Kraft. He died on November 26, 1956 in Greenwich, Connecticut, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Pianist, composer ("Everything Depends on You"), conductor and author educated at Schenley High School and in private piano study. He accompanied singers and was pianist for several instrumental groups, eventually forming his own band in Chicago in 1928, which he conducted into 1948 when he joined Louis Armstrong, remaining into 1951, thereafter touring Europe with Jack Teagarden into 1957. In San Francisco he led a band, making many records, and he gave weekly broadcasts for the US Treasury Department. Joining ASCAP in 1949, his other popular-song and instrumental compositions include "Deep Forest", "Rosetta", "My Monday Date", "Jelly Jelly, "Tantalizing a Cuban", "Mad House", "Dancing Fingers", and "The Earl".- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Irving Berlin was born Israel Isidor Baline on May 11, 1888 in Mogilev, Belarus, Russian Empire. Towering composer, songwriter, ("God Bless America", "Always", "Blue Skies", "White Christmas") author and publisher, he came to the United States at age 5 and was educated in New York's public schools. His earliest musical education was from his father, a cantor. He earned Honorary degrees from Bucknell University and Temple University. Beginning his career as a song-plugger for publisher Harry von Tilzer, Berlin worked as a singing waiter in Chinatown. In 1909, he was hired as a staff lyricist by the Ted Snyder Company, and became a partner to that firm four years later.
In 1910, he began doing vaudeville appearances in the United States and abroad, and also appeared with Snyder in the Broadway musical "Up and Down Broadway", that ran for 72 performances. He joined ASCAP as a charter member in 1914, and served on its first board of directors between 1914-1918. Berlin enlisted the United States Army infantry in World War I, and was a sergeant at Camp Upton, New York. After the war, he established his own public-relations firm, and in 1921, he built the 1025-seat Music Box Theatre (at 239 W. 45th Street, New York) with Sam H. Harris. After Harris' death in 1941, Berlin assumed full ownership and the theatre remains a Broadway institution to this day.
Among his many awards was the Medal for Merit for his 1942 all-soldier show "This Is the Army", which toured the United States, Europe and South Pacific battle zones; all proceeds were assigned to Army Emergency Relief and other service agencies. Berlin was also a member of the French Legion of Honor and held the Congressional Medal of Honor for "God Bless America", the proceeds from which went to the God Bless America Fund. His songs were sung by Fred Astaire, Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Dick Powell, Alice Faye and many others. Irving Berlin died at the age of 101 of natural causes on September 22, 1989 in New York City.- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Dave Brubeck was born on 6 December 1920 in Concord, California, USA. He was a composer and actor, known for Inland Empire (2006), Constantine (2005) and Baby Driver (2017). He was married to Iola Brubeck. He died on 5 December 2012 in Norwalk, Connecticut, USA.- Actor
- Soundtrack
"You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh; the fundamental things apply, as time goes by...". . The gentleman who crooned this now legendary tune for the morose Humphrey Bogart and moist-eyed Ingrid Bergman at Rick's Cafe Americain amid the bleak WWII backdrop was none other than 56-year-old Arthur "Dooley" Wilson, an African-American actor and singer who earned a comfortable niche for himself in film history with this simple, dramatic, piano-playing scene.
Dooley was born Arthur Wilson in Tyler, Texas. His exact year of birth was debated for years, listed in reference books as either 1886 or 1894. His grave marker, however, at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles gives the year 1886. At age 12 he performed in minstrel shows and later became a fixture in black theater in both Chicago and New York (circa 1908). He received the nickname "Dooley" while working in the Pekin Theatre in Chicago, because of his then-signature Irish song "Mr. Dooley," which he usually performed in whiteface as an Irishman. In subsequent years Dooley displayed his musical skills in various forms. As a vaudevillian, drummer and jazz band leader, he entertained both here and in 1920s European tours (Paris, London, etc). From the 1930s to the 1950s he focused on theatrical musicals and occasional films.
Appearing in such diverse Broadway plays as the comedy "Conjur Man Dies (1936) and the melodrama "The Strangler Fig" (1940), along with various Federal Theater productions for Orson Welles and John Houseman. This exposure led directly to his signing on as a contract player with Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. He unfortunately began things off in era stereotypes as porters, chauffeurs and the like. Unhappy with his movie roles he was about to abandon Hollywood altogether when Paramount lent him out to Warner Bros. for the piano-playing role of Sam and the rest is history. In Casablanca (1942), Dooley immortalized the song "As Time Goes By" as boss and nightclub owner Rick Blaine (Bogart) and lost true love Ilsa Lund (Bergman) briefly rekindled an old romantic flame. While paid only $350 a week for his services, Dooley achieved his own immortality as well. However, he was not a pianist in real life and was dubbed while fingering the keyboard. In addition to "As Time Goes By," Dooley's character did warm renditions of "It Had To Be You," "Shine," "Knock On Wood" and "Parlez-moi d'amour."
Back on the live stage Dooley portrayed an escaped slave in the musical "Bloomer Girl" (1946) and, as a result, made another song famous, "The Eagle and Me," which went on for inclusion in the Smithsonian recordings compilation "American Musical Theatre." He graced approximately twenty other motion pictures in all, including the war-era musicals Stormy Weather (1943) and Higher and Higher (1943).
In his final season of performing (1952-1953) Dooley was a regular on the TV sitcom Beulah (1950) which starred Ethel Waters. He played the title maid's boyfriend Bill Jackson and Dooley was the second of three actors who would play the role during its three-season run. Dooley died of natural causes on May 30, 1953, and was survived by wife, Estelle, who subsequently passed away in 1971.- Actor
- Music Department
- Composer
Born in New Orleans' French Quarter, Louis Prima longed to play jazz. When he was a child, he studied the violin. His older brother Leon took up trumpet while Louis was still quite young, and he soon followed in his brother's footsteps. He played in clubs like "The Famous Door" in the 1930s, and by the time the 1940s rolled around, Prima and his band were becoming well known. Like many other big bands, Prima always had a woman singer, his most famous being Keely Smith, with whom he recorded the classic "That Old Black Magic". She began with him when she was 16 years old, and he eventually married her. They were divorced in 1962, and he married 20-year-old Gia Maione that same year. In 1967 Prima voiced King Louie of the apes in the animated Disney feature The Jungle Book (1967). Prima died in 1978, but his music continues as some of the best jazz and swing music ever recorded.- Music Department
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Flamboyant, latterly white-maned, U.S. conductor known best for his popularization of classical music. (He is also known for teaching 'Mickey Mouse' a few things about music in Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), in which Stokowski was featured with the Philadelphia Orchestra). He was a pioneer in the use of hi-fi sound and bringing great music to the screen.- Actor
- Writer
- Composer
Pianist, composer, songwriter, entertainer and actor, educated at Borgerdydskolen and the Conservatory of Copenhagen. He studied with Egon Petri and Frederic Lammond. His concert career began in 1922, and he performed in a musical revue in 1934, and in films by 1937. Arriving in the US in 1940, he made his American radio debut on the Bing Crosby show. He was featured in his own one-man show "Comedy in Music", plus concert appearances throughout the USA and Europe. Joining ASCAP in 1961, he composed "Blue Serenade".- Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Coleman Hawkins was called "The father of the tenor sax". He was a pioneer in this instrument, starting his career with the blues singer Mamie Smith in 1921. In 1923 he played with Fletcher Henderson until 1934. In this orchestra he was a partner of Louis Armstrong in 1924. In the mid-thirties he went to Europe and played with many musicians, for example Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli and Benny Carter. In 1939 he returned to the USA and made a classic recording of "Body and Soul". The next year he formed his own big band. He was in activity until his death in 1969, in these last years he played with a small group with the trumpet player Roy Eldridge.- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Cole Porter was born June 9, 1891, at Peru, Indiana, the son of pharmacist Samuel Fenwick Porter and Kate Cole. Cole was raised on a 750-acre fruit ranch. Kate Cole married Samuel Porter in 1884 and had two children, Louis and Rachel, who both died in infancy. Porter's grandfather, J.G. Cole, was a multi-millionaire who made his fortune in the coal and western timber business. His mother introduced him to the violin and the piano. Cole started riding horses at age six and began to studying piano at eight at Indiana's Marion Conservatory. By age ten, he had begun to compose songs, and his first song was entitled "Song of the Birds".
He attended Worcester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905, an elite private school from which he graduated in 1909 as class valedictorian. That summer he toured Europe as a graduation present from his grandfather. That fall, he entered Yale University and lived in a single room at Garland's Lodging House at 242 York Street in New Haven, CT, and became a member of the Freshman Glee Club. In 1910, he published his first song, "Bridget McGuire". While at Yale, he wrote football fight songs including the "Yale Bulldog Song" and "Bingo Eli Yale," which was introduced at a Yale dining hall dinner concert. Classmates include poet Archibald Macleish, Bill Crocker of San Francisco banking family and actor Monty Woolley. Dean Acheson, later to be U.S. Secretary of State, lived in the same dorm with Porter and was a good friend of Porter. In his senior year he was president of the University Glee club and a football cheerleader.
Porter graduated from Yale in 1913 with a BA degree. He attended Harvard Law school from 1913 to 1914 and the Harvard School of Music from 1915 to 1916. In 1917 he went to France and distributed foodstuffs to war-ravaged villages. In April 1918 he joined the 32nd Field Artillery Regiment and worked with the Bureau of the Military Attache of the US. During this time he met the woman who would become his wife, Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy Kentucky divorcée, at a breakfast reception at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He did not, as is often rumored, join the French Foreign Legion at this time, nor receive a commission in the French army and see combat as an officer.
In 1919 he rented an apartment in Paris, enrolled in a school specializing in music composition and studied with Vincent D'indy. On December 18, 1919, married Linda Lee Thomas, honeymooning in the south of France. This was a "professional" marriage, as Cole was, in fact, gay. Linda had been previously married to a newspaper publisher and was described as a beautiful woman who was one of the most celebrated hostesses in Europe. The Porters made their home on the Rue Monsieur in Paris, where their parties were renowned as long and brilliant. They hired the Monte Carlo Ballet for one of their affairs; once, on a whim, they transported all of their guests to the French Riviera.
In 1923 they moved to Venice, Italy, where they lived in the Rezzonico Palace, the former home of poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. They built an extravagant floating night club that would accommodate up to 100 guests. They conducted elaborate games including treasure hunts through the canals and arranged spectacular balls.
Porter's first play on Broadway featured a former ballet dancer, actor Clifton Webb. He collaborated with E. Ray Goetz, the brother-in-law of Irving Berlin, on several Broadway plays, as Goetz was an established producer and lyricist.
His ballad "Love For Sale" was introduced on December 8, 1930, in a revue that starred Jimmy Durante and was introduced by Kathryn Crawford. Walter Winchell, the newspaper columnist and radio personality, promoted the song, which was later banned by many radio stations because of its content. In 1934, his hit "Anything Goes" appeared on Broadway. During the show's hectic rehearsal Porter once asked the stage doorman what he thought the show should be called. The doorman responded that nothing seemed to go right, with so many things being taken out and then put back in, that "Anything Goes" might be a good title. Porter liked it, and kept it. In 1936, while preparing for "Red, Hot and Blue" with Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante, Ethel Merman was hired to do stenographic work to help Porter in rewriting scripts of the show. He later said she was the best stenographers he ever had.
Porter wrote such classic songs as "Let's Do It" in 1928, "You Do Something To Me" in 1929, "Love For Sale" in 1930, "What Is This Thing Called Love?" in 1929, "Night and Day" in 1932, "I Get A Kick Out Of You" in 1934, "Begin the Beguine" in 1935, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in 1938, "Don't Fence Me In" in 1944, "I Love Paris" in 1953, "I've Got You Under My Skin", In the Still of The Night", "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To", "True Love", "Just One Of Those Things", "Anything Goes", "From This Moment On", "You're The Top", "Easy to Love" and many, many more.
On October 24, 1937, taking a break from a re-write of what would be his weakest musical, "You Never Know", visiting as a guest at a countess' home, Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, he was badly injured in a fall while horseback-riding. Both of his legs were smashed and he suffered a nerve injury. He was hospitalized for two years, confined to a wheelchair for five years and endured over 30 operations to save his legs over the next 20 years. During his recuperation he wrote a number of Broadway musicals.
On August 3, 1952, his beloved mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife, Linda, died of cancer on May 20, 1954. On April 3, 1958, he sustained his 33rd operation, and still suffering from chronic pain, his right leg was amputated. He refused to wear an artificial limb and lived as a virtual recluse in his apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. He sought refuge in alcohol, sleep, self-pity and sank into despair. He even refused to attend a "Salute to Cole Porter" at the Metropolitan Opera on May 15, 1960, and the commencement exercises at Yale University in June of 1960 when he was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, or his 70th birthday party arranged by his friends at the Orpheum Theater in New York City in June 1962.
After what appeared to be a successful kidney stone operation at St. John's hospital in Santa Monica, California, he died very unexpectedly on October 15, 1964. His funeral instructions were that he have no funeral or memorial service and he was buried adjacent to his mother and wife in Peru, Indiana.- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
Thomas Waller was born in 1904. He was one of the most important pianist in the history of jazz. He studied piano with James P. Johnson, one of the masters of the stride piano in the 1920s. Fats began recording his first piano solos in 1923. He worked in the revue "Hot Chocolates" in the late 1920s as a composer. Along with Duke Ellington, he is one of the most prolific composers in jazz. His best songs are, "Ain't Misbehavin' ", "Honeysuckle Rose", "Black and Blue", "Blue Turned Grey Over You" and "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now". He formed his own group in 1934, Fats Waller and his Rhythm, and recorded many records for RCA Victor. Two of his most notable film appearances were in Stormy Weather (1943) and King of Burlesque (1936). He died in 1943 on a train during a trip to California. He was just 39 years old.- Composer
- Actor
- Music Department
Muddy Waters (born McKinley Morganfield) was one of the major forces in contemporary blues. He was instrumental in bringing the sound of the Mississippi Delta to Chicago in the 1940s, where his recordings for the Chess label exerted an enormous influence on both blues and rock musicians from the mid-'50s to the present day. Muddy made his first recordings for the Library of Congress in the early 1940s, offering a style that was highly influenced by the legendary Robert Johnson. It was after World War II that Muddy, who had relocated to Chicago, began recording electric versions of his blues. Such well-known classics as "I Can't Be Satisfied", "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Workin'", "I Just Want To Make Love To You" and many more redefined the sound of blues for modern audiences. Over the years his band included such musicians as Otis Spann, Little Walter (aka Little Walter Jacobs), James Cotton, Junior Wells, Willie Dixon and numerous legends of the blues. He also inspired legions of young, white musicians to try their hand at the blues, including Mike Bloomfield, Johnny Winter, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Paul Butterfield, many of whom covered Muddy's music.- Actor
- Music Department
- Additional Crew
Antoine Dominique Domino Jr. (February 26, 1928 - October 24, 2017), known as Fats Domino, was an American pianist and singer-songwriter. One of the pioneers of rock and roll music, Domino sold more than 65 million records. Born in New Orleans to a French Creole family, Domino signed to Imperial Records in 1949. His first single "The Fat Man" is cited by some historians as the first rock and roll single and the first to sell more than 1 million copies. Domino continued to work with the song's co-writer Dave Bartholomew, contributing his distinctive rolling piano style to Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" (1952) and scoring a string of mainstream hits beginning with "Ain't That a Shame" (1955). Between 1955 and 1960, he had eleven Top 10 US pop hits. By 1955, five of his records had sold more than a million copies, being certified gold.- Music Department
- Soundtrack
T-Bone Walker was born on 28 May 1910 in Linden, Texas, USA. He is known for The Firm (1993), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and The Rainmaker (1997). He was married to Vida. He died on 16 March 1975 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Mississippi-born Elmore Leonard was a blues musician known as "The King of the Slide Guitar". He played on various radio shows throughout the South and built up a following. In 1951, he recorded his first record, "Dust My Broom", for the small Trumpet Records label out of Jackson, MS. It became a "sleeper" hit, breaking through to the Top-10 charts and making him a star. Leonard recorded more than 100 songs over the next dozen years and helped to shape what eventually became known as the "Chicago Blues" sound of the postwar period. He was elected to the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1980.
He died of a heart attack in Chicago in 1963.- Actor
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Conductor, composer and clarinetist, educated at Valparaiso University. He played professional football and was an insurance salesman and an auto and railroad mechanic. His musical career began when he played clarinet for the Del Lampe Orchestra, eventually leading his own orchestra for nine years at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom. Later, his orchestra toured. Joining ASCAP in 1933, his popular-song compositions include "Josephine", "Annabelle", "That Little Boy of Mine", "Baby Shoes", "Blue Hours", "With You Beside Me", "So Close to Me", "I'd Give My Kingdom for a Smile", "Beautiful Love", and his theme "The Waltz You Saved for Me".- Actor
- Music Department
- Composer
Born in Spain, Xavier Cugat's family moved to Havana, Cuba, when he was three. Always musically inclined, he packed up and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times newspaper during the day and labored to put together a band at night. After a few years of playing smaller clubs in the L.A. area, Cugat finally got his break when he and his band secured a job at the prestigious Coconut Grove nightclub in 1928. His style of music caught on, and Cugat was instrumental in bringing Latin music to the attention of the US public. In the '30s and '40s he was nicknamed "The Rumba King" because of his popularization of that Latin dance. In Cugat's film appearances he usually played himself, even if the character had a name other than Xavier Cugat, and he and his band appeared in several memorable MGM musicals in the '40s. After suffering a stroke in 1971, Xavier Cugat retired.- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Famed violinist and composer, educated at the Royal Music School in Odessa with Fiedelman, and in the Petrograd University with Leopold Auer. He was awarded an honorary Musical Doctorate from the Chicago Musical College. He made his Berlin debut in 1904, his London debut in 1905, and his New York debut with the Russian Symphony in 1908. Mischa Elman was a violin soloist with symphony orchstras throughout the world, and made many concert tours, records and broadcast appearances. He joined ASCAP in 1924, and his classical works include "Romance" and "In a Gondola" (for violin), and transcriptions of works by Schubert, Rachmaninoff, and Beethoven.- Actor
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Soundtrack
One of the great voices of the Metropolitan Opera, Lawrence Mervil Tibbet was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1896. Born at the end of the "wild west" era, he was only six when his father, who was a Kern County deputy sheriff, was killed by bandits. After training with, among others, Metropolitan Opera bass (and later film actor) Basil Ruysdael, he joined the Met, adding another "t" to his name in his initial contract. He made his company debut in the small role of Lovitsky in Mussorgsky's "Boris Godonov" in 1923. Two years later, in 1925, he caused a sensation as "Ford" in Verdi's "Falstaff" and his future with the company was assured. At home in French, Italian, German, and American opera, he created the leads in numerous Met premiers, most notably in Deems Taylor's "The King's Henchman," Verdi's "Simon Boccanegra," and Louis Gruenberg's "The Emperor Jones." Blessed, in his younger days, with boyish good looks, in addition to his powerful voice, he was one of the first great opera stars to enjoy success in Hollywood films, most notably 1929's "The Rogue Song," which brought him an Oscar nomination, and 1931's "Cuban Love Song," the latter opposite Lupe Velez and Jimmy Durante. He was also a highly-regarded recitalist and appeared successfully on radio. His recordings for Victor sold in the millions. In 1936, along with violinist Jascha Heifetz, he founded the American Guild of Musical Artists, serving for 17 years as its active president.
Unfortunately, beginning in around 1940, the stress of taking on too many heavy roles too early brought on a vocal crisis which only worsened in the next decade. He continued to take on new roles at the Metropolitan (Michele in Puccini's "Il Tabarro," Balstrode in Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes," Ivan in Mussorgsky's "Khovantchina"), but these were parts that stressed his considerable dramatic abilities, rather than his diminishing vocal ones. This vocal crisis also triggered a drinking problem (some have said vice versa) which also got progressively worse with time. Perhaps wisely, Tibbett left the Met at the end of the 1949-50 season.
The 1950s saw him appearing on stage in both musical and dramatic roles, most notably succeeding former Met colleague Ezio Pinza in the Broadway musical hit "Fanny," as well as hosting "Golden Voices" on NBC radio. But heavy drinking, which also brought on a well-publicized traffic arrest, left his once good looks bloated and puffy. An increasingly unhappy life ended in early 1960 when he tripped on a Persian runner in his home, badly gashing his head on the corner of his TV set and driving bone fragments into his brain. He died on July 17 at the age of 64. Tibbett's unhappy end is best forgotten. His contributions to the world of music will live forever.- Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Screamin' Jay Hawkins was best known for his song "I Put a Spell On You, " which he recorded on the Okeh label in 1956 and which helped win him cult status in the United States, Europe and Japan. He had originally planned the tune as a ballad, but after a night of heavy drinking he tried again--screaming, yelling and groaning--and never looked back. The snorting, some say "cannibalistic" delivery got "I Put A Spell On You" banned from radio stations across the country. Hawkins went on to use the same demented style again and again. An outrageous performer, he used bizarre stage props, often emerging out of coffins during shows. He would wield rubber snakes and fake tarantulas and wear a boar's tooth around his neck or a bone clipped to his nose. Jay Hawkins got his first break in 1951 as a pianist-valet to veteran jazz guitarist Tiny Grimes. His recording debut was 1952's "Why Did You Waste My Time, " backed by Grimes and his Rockin' Highlanders. In the 1960s, Ha!- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Sonny Boy Williamson was born on 5 December 1899 in Glendora, Mississippi, USA. He is known for Mulholland Drive (2001), Almost Famous (2000) and The Departed (2006). He died on 25 May 1965 in Helena, Arkansas, USA.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
German Romantic composer Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833 and died in Vienna, Austria in 1897. A perfectionist, he often compared himself unfavorably to composers such as Beethoven and ended up destroying many compositions without their ever being heard. While basically conservative, he showed musical growth throughout his four symphonies and occasionally borrowed wilder folk themes, such as in his Hungarian Dances, and he explored a vast range of human emotion in his Violin Concerto.
Although he never married, much of his later life involved a seemingly unending devotion to Clara Schumann, widow of composer Robert Schumann - both of whom were long-time friends to Brahms.- Jazz musician, blues vocalist and band leader Hot Lips Page (born Oran Page on January 27, 1908, in Dallas, TX) was much influenced and often overshadowed by Louis Armstrong. Page specialized on the trumpet from the age of 12. He first toured the vaudeville circuit with Ma Rainey, after a spell of manual labour in the Seminole oilfields in Texas. He joined Walter Page's Blue Devils in 1928 and, two years later, Bennie Moten. Building a reputation as a powerful lead trumpeter, Page remained with Moten for the next five years, then led a quintet in Kansas City. The improvisation in his playing continued to be based on the swing and blues riffs perfected as a soloist under Moten and, subsequently, Count Basie (who had assumed leadership of Moten's band following the latter's death in April 1935).
Page eventually moved to New York, organizing his own big band in August 1937, with residency at the Plantation Club. He briefly worked with Artie Shaw and His Orchestra, 1941-42, before forming another band in 1944, recording for Commodore and Savoy. Until 1949, he led a smaller outfit, which had engagements at several top spots, including the Famous Door, the Savoy in Boston and at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago. He also occasionally worked as a single act, or as accompanist for singers like Ethel Waters. Page toured Europe extensively between 1949-52. Back in New York in 1953, he returned to work as a freelance musician. A year later he suffered a heart attack and died in New York's Harlem Hospital at the age of just 46.
Page is perhaps best remembered for his excellent recordings of "St. James Infirmary" for Artie Shaw, and for the hit single "The Hucklebuck" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" for Pearl Bailey. - Music Department
- Soundtrack
Howlin' Wolf was born on 10 June 1910 in White Station, Mississippi, USA. He is known for The Sopranos (1999), Upgrade (2018) and The Bay (2012). He was married to Lillie Handley. He died on 10 January 1976 in Hines, Illinois, USA.- Music Artist
- Music Department
- Composer
John Coltrane was born on 23 September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, USA. He was a music artist and composer, known for Adrift (2018), Vanilla Sky (2001) and Zodiac (2007). He was married to Alice Macleod and Juanita Grubbs. He died on 17 July 1967 in Huntington, Long Island, New York, USA.- Music Department
- Composer
- Actor
Thelonious Monk was born on 10 October 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, USA. He was a composer and actor, known for The Omega Man (1971), La La Land (2016) and Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995). He was married to Nellie Monk. He died on 17 February 1982 in Englewood, New Jersey, USA.- Music Artist
- Actor
- Composer
Cannonball Adderley was born on 15 September 1928 in Tampa, Florida, USA. He was a music artist and actor, known for The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Mindhunters (2004) and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004). He was married to Olga James. He died on 8 August 1975 in Gary, Indiana, USA.- Music Department
- Actor
- Composer
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, along with Charlie Parker, ushered in the era of Be-Bop in the American jazz tradition. He was born in Cheraw, South Carolina, and was the youngest of nine children. He began playing piano at the age of four and received a music scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina. Most noted for his trademark "swollen cheeks", Gillespie admitted to copying the style of trumpeter Roy Eldridge early in his career. He replaced Eldridge in the 'Teddy Hill' Band after Eldridge's departure. He eventually began experimenting and creating his own style which would eventually come to the attention of Mario Bauza , the Godfather of Afro-Cuban jazz who was then a member of the Cab Calloway Orchestra. Though Calloway disliked Gillespie's style, calling it "Chinese music", he hired him to his band in 1939. Gillespie was later fired after two years when he cut a portion of Calloway's buttocks with a knife after Calloway accused him of throwing spitballs (the two men later became lifelong friends and often retold this story with great relish until both of their deaths). Although noted for his on- and off-stage clowning, Gillespie endured as one of the founding fathers of the Afro-Cuban &/or Latin Jazz tradition. Influenced by Mario Bauza, known as Gillespie's musical father, he was able to fuse Afro-American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms to form a burgeoning CuBop sound. Always a musical ambassador, he toured Africa, the Middle East and Latin America under the sponsorship of the US State Department. Quite often he returned, not only with fresh musical ideas, but with musicians who would eventually go on to achieve world renown. Among his proteges and collaborators are 'Chano Pozo', the great Afro-Cuban percussionist; Danilo Pérez, a master pianist and composer originally from Panama; Arturo Sandoval, trumpeter, composer and music educator originally from Cuba; Mongo Santamaria, an Afro-Cuban conguero, bonguero and composer; David Sanchez, saxophonist and composer; Chucho Valdés, an Afro-Cuban virtuoso pianist and composer; and Bobby Sanabria, a Bronx, NY-born Nuyorican percussionist, composer, educator, bandleader and expert in the Afro-Cuban musical tradition. Indeed, many Latin jazz classics such as "Manteca", "A Night in Tunisia" and "Guachi Guaro [Soul Sauce]" were composed by Gillespie and his musical collaborators. With a strong sense of pride in his Afro-American heritage, he left a legacy of musical excellence that embraced and fused all musical forms, but particularly those forms with roots deep in Africa such as the music of Cuba, other Latin American countries and the Caribbean. Additionally, he left a legacy of goodwill and good humor that infused jazz musicians and fans throughout the world with a genuine sense of jazz's ability to transcend national and ethnic boundaries--for this reason, Gillespie was and is an international treasure.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Big Joe Turner was born on 18 May 1911 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. He was an actor, known for The Rainmaker (1997), Uncle Buck (1989) and Lone Star (1996). He was married to Patricia. He died on 24 November 1985 in Los Angeles, California, USA.