80 Composers of Ale
My favorite film music composers; the first 20 are ranked, though it must be said that deciding between the top 3 remains very difficult, and I could change them around at any time. My general rules of thumb are pretty simple: I'm considering only the film music - which is why Bliss, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich for example don't rate as highly as many others - and I'm only including composers who have been responsible for at least two scores/soundtracks that I *love*. One-offs, like Peter Gabriel and Neil Young who each have one soundtrack that I'm obsessed with, don't make the cut.
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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".- Composer
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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 Department
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Born on February 10, 1929, Jerry Goldsmith studied piano with Jakob Gimpel and composition, theory, and counterpoint with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He also attended classes in film composition given by Miklós Rózsa at the Univeristy of Southern California. In 1950, he was employed as a clerk typist in the music department at CBS. There, he was given his first embryonic assignments as a composer for radio shows such as "Romance" and "CBS Radio Workshop". He wrote one score a week for these shows, which were performed live on transmission. He stayed with CBS until 1960, having already scored The Twilight Zone (1959). He was hired by Revue Studios to score their series Thriller (1960). It was here that he met the influential film composer Alfred Newman who hired Goldsmith to score the film Lonely Are the Brave (1962), his first major feature film score. An experimentalist, Goldsmith constantly pushed forward the bounds of film music: Planet of the Apes (1968) included horns blown without mouthpieces and a bass clarinetist fingering the notes but not blowing. He was unafraid to use the wide variety of electronic sounds and instruments which had become available, although he did not use them for their own sake.
He rose rapidly to the top of his profession in the early to mid-1960s, with scores such as Freud (1962), A Patch of Blue (1965) and The Sand Pebbles (1966). In fact, he received Oscar nominations for all three and another in the 1960s for Planet of the Apes (1968). From then onwards, his career and reputation was secure and he scored an astonishing variety of films during the next 30 years or so, from Patton (1970) to Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and from Chinatown (1974) to The Boys from Brazil (1978). He received 17 Oscar nominations but won only once, for The Omen (1976) in 1977 (Goldsmith himself dismissed the thought of even getting a nomination for work on a "horror show"). He enjoyed giving concerts of his music and performed all over the world, notably in London, where he built up a strong relationship with London Symphony Orchestra.
Jerry Goldsmith died at age 75 on July 21, 2004 after a long battle with cancer.- Music Department
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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.- Composer
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Eduard Artemyev is a Soviet and Russian composer. He is widely known as the author of music for films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrey Konchalovskiy and Nikita Mikhalkov.
Artemyev was born in Novosibirsk. He received his primary musical education at the Moscow Choir School. Later in 1960 he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. Artemyev became widely known for his work in the cinema. He has composed music for over 150 feature films, documentaries and animated films.- Composer
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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.- Composer
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One of the most prolific and versatile score composers in the history of contemporary cinema, known for his essential contribution to the films of Chilean director Raúl Ruiz. Their French debut Dog's Dialogue (1977) won a Cesar for best short film, launching them as what has become the most productive and artistically creative duo in Latin American cinema history. Arriagada is a musical descendant of Arnold Schönberg. He studied composition and orchestral conduction at the National Music Conservatory in Santiago, Chile, subsequently obtaining a scholarship from the French Government to study expressionism with Schönberg's friend and student, Max Deutsch in Paris. Other relevant teachers were Olivier Messiaen in composition and Pierre Boulez in orchestra conduction. In 1972 he was awarded with a fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation in New York, due to his contribution in the field of electronic music. Through more than 100 films, Jorge Arriagada has given proof of great virtuosity, exploring all possible genres and styles: classic, contemporary, folk music, jazz and tango, among others. Memorable scores include Silver Bear award winning films like Genealogies of a Crime (1997) and Shattered Image (1998). Recent full orchestral scores include the films Klimt (2006) and Marcel Proust's Time Regained (1999), the later based on Marcel Proust's famous literary work. Jorge Arriagada was the first composer to make a musical interpretation of Proust's imaginary "Sonate de Vinteuil", for this particular film. He has also contributed with scores for the films of directors Miguel Littin and Olivier Assayas, as well as for the productions of Nouvelle Vague pioneer, producer-director Barbet Schroeder.- Composer
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Michael Nyman studied piano, harpsichord and music history with Alan Bush at the Royal Academy of Music, and musicology with Thurston Dart at King's College, London. Between 1968 and 1978 he worked as a music critic and in 1977 he founded the Campiello Band, later renamed the Michael Nyman Band. Many of his filmscores were composed for the films of Peter Greenaway. He has also written several operas, ballet music and a large number of chamber and concert pieces.- Music Department
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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
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Angelo Badalamenti was born on 22 March 1937 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He was a composer and actor, known for Mulholland Drive (2001), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and Lost Highway (1997). He was married to Lonny Irgens. He died on 11 December 2022 in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, USA.- Composer
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Jürgen Knieper was born on 14 March 1941 in Karlsruhe, Germany. He is a composer and actor, known for Wings of Desire (1987), Wrong Move (1975) and Christiane F. (1981).- Composer
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Carl Stalling is the most famous unknown composer of the 20th century, almost solely based on his work composing musical scores for animated cartoons. Stalling's first work in music was as house organist in Newman Theatre in Kansas City, where he would accompany the latest silent film with his organ playing. He soon came to the attention of fellow Kansan Walt Disney, who recruited Stalling as musical director for his fledgling animation company. At Disney, Stalling invented the "tick" method, a timing device that allows animators to set the tempo of the cartoons, so that the musicians can play along before the cartoon is even drawn! Stalling created the music for Disney's early "Silly Symphonies", including The Skeleton Dance (1929). Stalling left Disney in 1930 to join the new animation group at Warner Brothers. The advantage for Stalling was that he now had access to Warner's enormous library of popular songs, which he began to employ as a sort of musical pun. For example, any scene showing someone freezing would be accompanied by a bit of "Am I Blue?", or any shot of a country bumpkin would be followed by a few bars of "Arkansas Traveller." Stalling's main source of musical inspiration, however, were the works of Raymond Scott; Scott's "Powerhouse" theme is forever linked with Stalling's work for Warners. Stalling was a quiet man, granting only one interview about his work (for "Funnyworld" magazine). For a better appreciation of his work, fans should get the two "Stalling Projects" CDs.- Music Department
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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.- Composer
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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.- Composer
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Joe Hisaishi was born on 6 December 1950 in Nakano, Japan. He is a composer and director, known for Spirited Away (2001), The Boy and the Heron (2023) and Fireworks (1997). He is married to Ayame Fujisawa . They have one child.- Music Department
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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
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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.- Writer
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Justin Hurwitz was born on 22 January 1985 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for La La Land (2016), First Man (2018) and Whiplash (2014).- Composer
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Allan (or Josef as he was then) studied under the great pioneering modernist Arnold Schönberg. To pay for his tuition he composed popular, jazz-influenced tunes for cabaret acts in Berlin. Josef took his pseudonym from Oscar Wilde's narcissistic hero, Dorian Gray.- Composer
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Mihály Vig was born on 21 September 1957 in Budapest, Hungary. He is a composer and actor, known for Satantango (1994), The Long Way Home (2013) and The Turin Horse (2011).- Composer
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Philippe Arthuys was born on 22 November 1928 in Paris, France. He was a composer and writer, known for La cage de verre (1965), Des Christs par milliers (1969) and The Hole (1960). He died on 6 January 2010 in Toulouse, France.- Composer
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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
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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.- Composer
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Babak Bayat was born on 13 June 1946 in Tehran, Iran. He was a composer and actor, known for The Spell (1987), The Ship Angelica (1989) and Hassan, the Bald (1970). He died on 26 November 2006 in Tehran, Iran.- Composer
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A world renowned trumpeter/composer/band leader and Blue Note recording artist, Terence Blanchard is the most prolific jazz musician to ever compose for motion pictures. Blanchard was born and raised in New Orleans where he studied with the Marsalis brothers at the famed New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. In 1980, he won a scholarship to Rutgers University and immediately began performing in the Lionel Hampton Orchestra. Two years later, he succeeded Wynton Marsalis in the legendary Jazz Messengers before forming his own influential groups. Blanchard originally began performing on Spike Lee's soundtracks, including "Mo Better Blues" in which he ghosted the trumpet for Denzel Washington. Blanchard lives in New Orleans with his wife, Robin, and his four children.- Music Department
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Arthur Bliss was born on 2 August 1891 in London, England, UK. He was a composer and actor, known for Things to Come (1936), Seven Days from Now (1957) and Christopher Columbus (1949). He was married to Gertrude Hoffmann. He died on 28 March 1975 in London, England, UK.- Composer
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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.- Composer
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Wendy Carlos, one of the great innovators in synthesized and electronic music, was born as Walter Carlos in Rhode Island on November 14, 1939. She underwent a sex-change operation in 1972, details of which she revealed during a surprise Playboy interview in 1979. Walter's last credited release is "Sonic Seasonings" (1972). Wendy's first credited release is the "Tron" soundtrack (1982), which was released on CD in 2002.- Music Department
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John Howard Carpenter was born in Carthage, New York, to mother Milton Jean (Carter) and father Howard Ralph Carpenter. His family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where his father, a professor, was head of the music department at Western Kentucky University. He attended Western Kentucky University and then USC film school in Los Angeles. He began making short films in 1962, and won an Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Subject in 1970, for The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970), which he made while at USC. Carpenter formed a band in the mid-1970s called The Coupe de Villes, which included future directors Tommy Lee Wallace and Nick Castle. Since the 1970s, he has had numerous roles in the film industry including writer, actor, composer, producer, and director. After directing Dark Star (1974), he has helmed both classic horror films like Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and The Thing (1982), and noted sci-fi tales like Escape from New York (1981) and Starman (1984).- Music Artist
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Nick Cave is a man of many talents. Musician. Songwriter. Screenwriter. Novelist. Actor. The Australian was born in Warracknabeal, Victoria in 1957, and would go onto form the alternative rock band Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, who have since successfully released a string of hit albums.
In film, Nick has starred in two films with Brad Pitt: Johnny Suede (1991) by Tom DiCillo and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). He scripted the dark western, The Proposition (2005) and has contributed to over 50 soundtracks including Gas Food Lodging (1992) with fellow rocker J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr.. His first contribution was in the Marlon Brando film, The Freshman (1990): 'From Her To Eternity'.
Nick is also a lyricist and poet. His first offering was 'King Ink' (1988).- Writer
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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.- Music Department
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Born in Santa Monica, Ca., Ry Cooder, at the age of four had an accident which left him blind in one eye. He became a bit secluded and began playing the guitar. His biggest influences include Blind Willie Johnson, Arthur "Blind" Blake, Joseph Spence and Curtis Mayfield. Cooder has played on several albums from the Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Eric Clapton and Duane Eddy. He has one son, Joachim, who has played several percussive instruments on his recent albums and soundtracks.- Music Department
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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
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Mychael Danna is an Oscar and and Emmy Award-winning film composer recognized for his evocative blending of non-western traditions with orchestral and electronic music. His highly awarded works include the Oscar-winning score for Ang Lee's Life of Pi (2012), and his many Genie Award-winning scores for director and longtime collaborator, Atom Egoyan.
His passion for presenting complex ideas in a musically accessible way began as Danna learned his craft at the University of Toronto. There, he was exposed to early- and world-music that later influenced his style. Danna earned the school's inaugural "Glenn Gould Composition Award" in 1985 and also began scoring for student theatre groups, as he launched his artistic partnership with Egoyan. Danna has scored all of Egoyan's films since 1987's Family Viewing (1987).
Danna's work on Egoyan's films, Ararat (2002), Felicia's Journey (1999), The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Exotica (1994), secured him Genie awards from the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television; as did his score for Deepa Mehta's Oscar-winning film, Water (2005).
Danna earned the 2013 Golden Globe and 2013 Oscar for scoring Ang Lee's Life of Pi (2012), following his collaborations with Lee on The Ice Storm (1997) and Ride with the Devil (1999).
Life of Pi (2012)'s rich soundscape reflects a deeply transnational story with inventive cross-cultural arrangements: Indian sitars play French melodies, European play South Asian motifs, a church choir sings in Sanskrit, and a variety of other musical combinations soar alongside a full studio orchestra.
The highly awarded work embodies Danna's approach to composition-creating rich soundscapes to be appreciated by a wide audience.
Other celebrated collaborations include those with Bennett Miller on his multiple Oscar-nominee Moneyball (2011) and his Oscar-winning drama, Capote (2005); with Terry Gilliam on his Oscar-nominated The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) and Tideland (2005); with Mira Nair on Vanity Fair (2004), Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996); and with Billy Ray on Breach (2007) and Shattered Glass (2003).
Danna's credits also include the Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine (2006), for which he shared a Grammy Award nomination for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album; Marc Webb's acclaimed romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer (2009); and James Mangold's Oscar-winning film, Girl, Interrupted (1999).- Composer
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Georges Delerue was born on 12 March 1925 in Roubaix, Nord, France. He was a composer and actor, known for Platoon (1986), Twins (1988) and The Day of the Dolphin (1973). He was married to Micheline Gautron. He died on 20 March 1992 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Composer
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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
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Born in Burano (Venice) in 1941, Pino Donaggio studied violin at the Conservatory of Venice and Milan.
After a period of adolescent performer of classical music with the Solisti Veneti and the Soloists of Milan, in 1959 he began to devote himself to the pop music that soon led to international success.
He has participated in ten editions of the Sanremo Festival getting a 3rd place in 1963 with the song "Giovane giovane" and a 4th place in 1966 with the song "Una casa in cima al mondo". His best-known song and performed is 1965 "Io che non vivo (senza te)" starring, among others, also by Elvis Presley.
Since 1973, Donaggio began gradually to abandon pop music to devote himself to composing music for films. In over forty years of activity it has put together more than two hundred soundtracks for the big and small screen, both in Italy and abroad.
He lives and works in Venice.- Composer
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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
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Brian studied under Gordon Jacob and Armstrong Gibbs at the RCM (Royal College of Music). He wrote his first opera (Rapunzel) at the age of 17 and at age 20 had the honor of having a Dead March processional he had written performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir 'Malcolm Sargent'. Brian served with the Royal Artillery during WWII but spent a lot of that time working as a composer for various government Film Units composing the music for training films and propaganda works. His major film work was done for the famous team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger with suitably dramatic scores for Black Narcissus (1947) and most famously The Red Shoes (1948). When their regular composer 'Allan Gray' failed to deliver what they wanted for The Red Shoes (1948) Powell & Pressburger turned to Easdale. He wrote the complete ballet score complete with innovations such as the mysterious Ondes Martenot.- Actor
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Clinton Eastwood Jr. was born May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, to Clinton Eastwood Sr., a bond salesman and later manufacturing executive for Georgia-Pacific Corporation, and Ruth Wood (née Margret Ruth Runner), a housewife turned IBM clerk. He grew up in nearby Piedmont. At school Clint took interest in music and mechanics, but was an otherwise bored student; this resulted in being held back a grade. In 1949, the year he is said to have graduated from high school, his parents and younger sister Jeanne moved to Seattle. Clint spent a couple years in the Pacific Northwest himself, operating log broncs in Springfield, Oregon, with summer gigs life-guarding in Renton, Washington. Returning to California in 1951, he did a two-year stint at Fort Ord Military Reservation and later enrolled at L.A. City College, but dropped out to pursue acting.
During the mid-1950s he landed uncredited bit parts in such B-films as Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula (1955) while digging swimming pools and driving a garbage truck to supplement his income. In 1958, he landed his first consequential acting role in the long-running TV show Rawhide (1959) with Eric Fleming. Although only a secondary player the first seven seasons, he was promoted to series star when Fleming departed--both literally and figuratively--in its final year, along the way becoming a recognizable face to television viewers around the country.
Eastwood's big-screen breakthrough came as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's trilogy of excellent spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The movies were shown exclusively in Italy during their respective copyright years with Enrico Maria Salerno providing the voice of Eastwood's character, finally getting American distribution in 1967-68. As the last film racked up respectable grosses, Eastwood, 37, rose from a barely registering actor to sought-after commodity in just a matter of months. Again a success was the late-blooming star's first U.S.-made western, Hang 'Em High (1968). He followed that up with the lead role in Coogan's Bluff (1968) (the loose inspiration for the TV series McCloud (1970)), before playing second fiddle to Richard Burton in the World War II epic Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Lee Marvin in the bizarre musical Paint Your Wagon (1969). In Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and Kelly's Heroes (1970), Eastwood leaned in an experimental direction by combining tough-guy action with offbeat humor.
1971 proved to be his busiest year in film. He starred as a sleazy Union soldier in The Beguiled (1971) to critical acclaim, and made his directorial debut with the classic erotic thriller Play Misty for Me (1971). His role as the hard edge police inspector in Dirty Harry (1971), meanwhile, boosted him to cultural icon status and helped popularize the loose-cannon cop genre. Eastwood put out a steady stream of entertaining movies thereafter: the westerns Joe Kidd (1972), High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (his first of six onscreen collaborations with then live-in love Sondra Locke), the Dirty Harry sequels Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976), the action-packed road adventures Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Gauntlet (1977), and the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979). He branched out into the comedy genre in 1978 with Every Which Way But Loose (1978), which became the biggest hit of his career up to that time; taking inflation into account, it still is. In short, The Eiger Sanction (1975) notwithstanding, the 1970s were nonstop success for Eastwood.
Eastwood kicked off the 1980s with Any Which Way You Can (1980), the blockbuster sequel to Every Which Way but Loose. The fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), was the highest-grossing film of the franchise and spawned his trademark catchphrase: "Make my day." He also starred in Bronco Billy (1980), Firefox (1982), Tightrope (1984), City Heat (1984), Pale Rider (1985) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986), all of which were solid hits, with Honkytonk Man (1982) being his only commercial failure of the period. In 1988, he did his fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988). Although it was a success overall, it did not have the box office punch the previous films had. About this time, with outright bombs like Pink Cadillac (1989) and The Rookie (1990), it seemed Eastwood's star was declining as it never had before. He then started taking on low-key projects, directing Bird (1988), a biopic of Charlie Parker that earned him a Golden Globe, and starring in and directing White Hunter Black Heart (1990), an uneven, loose biopic of John Huston (both films had a limited release).
Eastwood bounced back big time with his dark western Unforgiven (1992), which garnered the then 62-year-old his first ever Academy Award nomination (Best Actor), and an Oscar win for Best Director. Churning out a quick follow-up hit, he took on the secret service in In the Line of Fire (1993), then accepted second billing for the first time since 1970 in the interesting but poorly received A Perfect World (1993) with Kevin Costner. Next was a love story, The Bridges of Madison County (1995), where Eastwood surprised audiences with a sensitive performance alongside none other than Meryl Streep. But it soon became apparent he was going backwards after his brief revival. Subsequent films were credible, but nothing really stuck out. Absolute Power (1997) and Space Cowboys (2000) did well enough, while True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002) were received badly, as was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), which he directed but didn't appear in.
Eastwood surprised again in the mid-2000s, returning to the top of the A-list with Million Dollar Baby (2004). Also starring Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, the hugely successful drama won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. He scored his second Best Actor nomination, too. His next starring vehicle, Gran Torino (2008), earned almost $30 million in its opening weekend and was his highest grosser unadjusted for inflation. 2012 saw him in a rare lighthearted movie, Trouble with the Curve (2012), as well as a reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company (2012).
Between acting jobs, he chalked up an impressive list of credits behind the camera. He directed Mystic River (2003) (in which Sean Penn and Tim Robbins gave Oscar-winning performances), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) (nominated for the Best Picture Oscar), Changeling (2008) (a vehicle for Angelina Jolie), Invictus (2009) (again with Freeman), Hereafter (2010), J. Edgar (2011), Jersey Boys (2014), American Sniper (2014) (2014's top box office champ), Sully (2016) (starring Tom Hanks as hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger) and The 15:17 to Paris (2018). Back on screens after a considerable absence, he played an unlikely drug courier in The Mule (2018), which reached the top of the box office with a nine-figure gross, then directed Richard Jewell (2019). At age 91, Eastwood made history as the oldest actor to star above the title in a movie with the release of Cry Macho (2021).
Away from the limelight, Eastwood has led an aberrant existence and is described by biographer Patrick McGilligan as a cunning manipulator of the media. His convoluted slew of partners and children are now somewhat factually acknowledged, but for the first three decades of his celebrity, his personal life was kept top secret, and several of his families were left out of the official narrative. The actor refuses to disclose his exact number of offspring even to this day. He had a longtime relationship with similarly abstruse co-star Locke (who died aged 74 in 2018, though for her entire public life she masqueraded about being younger), and has fathered at least eight children by at least six different women in an unending string of liaisons, many of which overlapped. He has been married only twice, however, with a mere three of his progeny coming from those unions.
His known children are: Laurie Murray (b. 1954), whose mother is unidentified; Kimber Eastwood (b. 1964) with stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis; Kyle Eastwood (b. 1968) and Alison Eastwood (b. 1972) with his first ex-wife, Margaret Neville Johnson; Scott Eastwood (b. 1986) and Kathryn Eastwood (b. 1988) with stewardess Jacelyn Reeves; Francesca Eastwood (b. 1993) with actress Frances Fisher; and Morgan Eastwood (b. 1996) with his second ex-wife, Dina Eastwood. The entire time that he lived with Locke she was legally married to sculptor Gordon Anderson.
Eastwood has real estate holdings in Bel-Air, La Quinta, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Cassel (in remote northern California), Idaho's Sun Valley and Kihei, Hawaii.- Composer
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Jon A. English is known for All the Vermeers in New York (1990), Days and Clouds (2007) and Frameup (1993). He has been married to Carmen since 1969.- Majid Entezami is an Iranian composer, conductor, musician and oboist. He composed music for 9 television series, 10 suite symphonies and over 80 movies. His works include The Cyclist, The Fateful Day, The Glass Agency and The Insane Flew Away, all of which he was awarded the best award for film music for in the International Fajr Film Festival of Tehran. Besides that, his music for The Train, Once Upon A Time, Cinema, From Karkheh To Rhine, Attack on H-3, The Fragrance of Joseph's Shirt, Duel, A Place To Live, Intense Cold, The Saint Mary, The Men of Anjelos, The Wolves and The Loneliest General are some of his most notable, memorable and nostalgic works for Iranians. Majid Entezami is one of the most active film composers after the revolution of Iran.
Majid Entezami was born in 1948 in Tehran. He played the oboe at the Tehran Conservatory of Music. After graduation he was forced to travel to Germany for a medical operation and decided to continue his studies at State University of West Berlin under the supervision of Karl Steins and Lothar Koch in 1968. He performed successful concerts with Berlin University Symphony Orchestra in Lyon, Nancy and Marseille, France from 1969 to 1972.
In 1973 Entezami came to Iran by the invitation of Tehran Symphony Orchestra and performed a successful Mozart concert as oboe soloist, conducted by Helge Dorsch. After this concert Journal de Tehran called him one of the most talented young musicians in Iran. Then he returned to Germany as a member of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and West Deutsche Philharmonie.
In 1974 he became a member of Tehran Symphony Orchestra as well as teacher at the Tehran Conservatory and music department of Tehran University. After his return he has performed two oboe recitals with Lucette Martirossian on piano and harpsichord and Ivan Pristas on bassoon in 1976 and a concert with the Les Jeunesses Musicales de I'Iran orchestra conducted by Ali Rahbari and Valodia Tarkhanian as viola d'amore soloist.
Despite being the son of famous Iranian actor Ezzatollah Entezami, Majid's entrance into the cinema industry was his own. In 1977, due to differences of opinion with the Symphonic Orchestra of Tehran, he resigned from playing in the orchestra and teaching at the university and took other work. At the time, one of his friends who had a position in Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), Ahmadreza Ahmadi, suggested composing some music for contemporary poetry. After composing music for the poetry of Foroogh Farrokhzad and Nosrat Rahmani, he found another position composing music for an animation, Zaal and Simorgh by Ali Akbar Sadeghi. Entezami's first cinema work was for Journey of the Stone, directed by Masoud Kimiaei, who was a famous director at that time. - Composer
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A three-time Oscar nominee, Jerry Fielding was among the boldest and most experimental of all Hollywood film composers. His music typically utilized advanced compositional procedures, producing dense, often richly dissonant orchestral textures, sometimes flavored with jazz. Fielding's film music career was marked by enduring and rewarding collaborations with Sam Peckinpah, Michael Winner and Clint Eastwood.
Born Joshua Feldman in Pittsburgh in 1922 to immigrant Russian parents, Jerry Fielding was brought up in a music-loving but non-musical household. As a home-bound, somewhat sickly teenager, Fielding derived early inspiration from the radio productions of Orson Welles, with their groundbreaking Bernard Herrmann scores. He was also fascinated by the increasingly advanced orchestrations being done for the swing bands of the time, with their heavy reliance on aspects of classical music. The young Fielding joined the studio of Max Adkins, the noted director of theatrical music who also included Henry Mancini and Murray Gerson among his students. After picking up vital arranging skills, Fielding toured with some of the leading dance bands of the 1940s. This led to Hollywood, where his radio and television assignments included conducting and arranging for many of the most popular variety shows of the time, including those of Groucho Marx.
At this time the shadow of McCarthyism was looming over America and Fielding, a self-confessed "loud-mouthed crusader", found himself among its many victims. His hiring of black musicians for his television orchestra (unheard of in those days) brought criticism and threats. His progressive affiliations brought him to the attention of the FBI and HUAC. Despite his strong liberal beliefs, Fielding said that McCarthy's men were probably more interested in getting him to name Groucho Marx as a "fellow traveler". He took the Fifth Amendment and promptly found his Hollywood career in ruins. He eventually found employment in the safe haven of Las Vegas, where he became musical director for the stage shows of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher and others. He also began recording the first of many pop and swing LPs, such as "Fielding's Formula", "Sweet With A Beat" and "Hollywood Brass".
The approach of the 1960s saw the end of McCarthyism and Fielding's return to Hollywood. In 1962, at the suggestion of his writer friend Dalton Trumbo, Fielding was hired by Otto Preminger for the film Advise & Consent (1962), a tale of political intrigue amid the halls of Washington, DC. It was a remarkable debut score that combined light orchestral lyricism with hints of the richer, almost ethereal textures of his later work. It was also drenched in Fielding's own brand of dark irony--a trademark of the composer.
Around this time Fielding, hungry to expand his compositional technique, enrolled as a student of the venerated composer and teacher Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who, incidentally, had given similar instruction to Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams. More television work followed, including scores to Mission: Impossible (1966) and Star Trek (1966). In 1967 Fielding scored Noon Wine (1966), a contemporary western for television directed by Sam Peckinpah. It was the first in a legendary though sometimes tumultuous partnership. In 1969 came The Wild Bunch (1969). This landmark western was Peckinpah's and Fielding's breakthrough movie. The composer caught the weariness, dust, dirt and blood of a vanishing West in a rich underscore that interspersed sprightly action cues with wistful Mexican folk melodies and nostalgic, bittersweet dirges. However, as always, the nostalgia was tempered with Fielding's characteristically steely irony. It earned him his first Oscar nomination. A second came with Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) in 1971. This controversial though somewhat garbled tale of the violence lurking within a meek man saw Fielding's music take a new direction. Inspired by Igor Stravinsky's "Histoire Du Soldat", and with a large orchestra supplying dense, yearning sound clusters, this remarkable work gives voice to both the characters' inner turmoil and the desolate Cornish landscapes of the film's setting.
Fielding provided another sensitive, beautifully forlorn score for Peckinpah's proxy self-portrait, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). However, some Peckinpah collaborations were not so happy. Fielding's music for The Getaway (1972) was rejected in favor of a score by Quincy Jones. Then in 1973 Fielding backed out of working with Bob Dylan on the score for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).
Fielding's association with Michael Winner began in 1970 with Lawman (1971), for which the composer supplied an epic score tinged with jazz--something of a first for a western! Then followed the searing, impressionistic music for Chato's Land (1972), The Mechanic (1972) and Scorpio (1973). A standout score was for Winner's gothic melodrama, The Nightcomers (1971). This gave Fielding a chance to indulge his love of 19th-century baroque music. The composer considered it among his finest works. His final score for Winner was for The Big Sleep (1978). It was an admirable consummation of the composer's various techniques.
Clint Eastwood was well served by Fielding's scores to The Enforcer (1976) and The Gauntlet (1977). The composer responded to their hard-edged urban milieu with full-on jazz compositions that featured some of the best jazz players in the business. In 1976 Fielding received his third and final Oscar nomination for Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).
Jerry Fielding was a man who fought hard to get his brand of music into films. He was not a glad-hander. He was an uncompromising artist who perhaps sacrificed many choice assignments by spurning easy, producer-friendly routes. These stances may have taken their toll on him. From the mid-'70s onwards, the composer endured a series of heart attacks. In 1980 he suffered a fatal heart seizure while in Canada scoring Funeral Home. He was 57 years old. Jerry Fielding had an innately humane approach to film scoring. He eschewed traditional "mickey-mousing" techniques (i.e., slavishly following every on-screen action). Rather, his music sought to mirror and illuminate the motivations and deepest inner lives of the characters. This it did with great compassion, beauty and sensitivity. Producer Gordon T. Dawson touchingly described Fielding's music as being " . . . like a man in a green suit walking in a forest."
And so it is.- Music Department
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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.- Composer
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For 25 years, Goblin has been scoring soundtracks for Italian films, mainly Giallo-style films directed by Dario Argento. The group consisted of keyboardist Claudio Simonetti, percussionist Walter Martino, bassist Fabio Pignatelli, guitarist Massimo Morante, percussionist Agostino Marangolo, and saxophone player, Antonio Marangolo. Simonetti and Morante were the two original founders of Goblin, which originally wanted to go under the name, "Oliver". Pignatelli had previously worked on other projects before joining Goblin. In 1975, he became a member of Cherry Five and released an album with them. Their film scoring debut was in 1975 with Argento's _Profondo Rosso (1975)_, under the direction of 'Giorgio Gaslini' . Immediately, the soundtrack had become a success with their '70s Rock style music, which had been preferred more than Gaslini's scores. Two years after the success of the Profondo Rosso Soundtrack, Goblin scored music for Argento's next film, Suspiria (1977). It was the first time that they had used sequencers. Then, in 1978, they scored the soundtrack to the Italian cut of 'George A. Romero''s Dawn of the Dead (1978). After that, the group made an album called "Il Fantastico Viaggio Del 'Bagarozzo' Mark", which spoke against heroin use. Then, the group had many problems and were unable to work together. Some members continued scoring films under the name of Goblin. Simonetti scored films like _Squadra Antigangsters (1979)_, _Amo Non Amo (1979)_, _Demons (1985)_, and Opera (1987). Pignatelli, and the Marangolos scored films like _Patrick (1979)_, _Contamination (1980)_, and _Notturno (1983)_. In 1982, Goblin had reunited to score Dario Argento's next film, Tenebrae (1982). They were credited as Simonetti-Pignatelli-Morante for Tenebre, but were credited as Goblin for Argento's film, _Phenomena (1984)_. The last film that Goblin scored, was Michele Soavi's film, _La Chiesa(1989)_.- Composer
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Jonny Greenwood was born on 5 November 1971 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK. He is a composer and actor, known for The Master (2012), There Will Be Blood (2007) and Phantom Thread (2017). He has been married to Sharona Katan since 1995. They have three children.- Music Department
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Herbie Hancock is an American actor that was born. Herbert Jeffery Hancock, on April 12, 1940, Chicago, IL. He is best known as a piano player, jazz star, and a composer. He has won many Grammy Awards and has performed with many famous musicians beginning with Miles Davis in the 1960s. He achieved fame with the Mtv generation in the 1980s with his instrumental hit, "Rock it". He and his wife Gigi, have been married since 1968. Later in life, Herbie returned to fame by acting in movies such as. Hitters, Round Midnight, and "Valerarian, World of a Thousand Cities" (2017).- Composer
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Academy Award-winning composer (score, Pinocchio (1940), conductor, songwriter ("When You Wish Upon a Star" [Academy award, Best Song, 1940) and arranger Leigh Harine was educated at the University of Utah. He was a music student of J. Spencer Cornwall. He arranged the first transcontinental broadcast from Los Angeles in 1932, and that year joined the Walt Disney Studios. From 1941 he freelanced among various Hollywood studios. He joined ASCAP in 1940. His other popular song compositions include "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee", "Give a Little Whistle" and "Jiminy Cricket".- Sound Department
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Bo Harwood was born on 6 March 1946 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a composer, known for UHF (1989), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Ups & Downs (1983). He died on 1 September 2022 in the USA.- Composer
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Hans Werner Henze was born on 1 July 1926 in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He was a composer and writer, known for The Exorcist (1973), Love Unto Death (1984) and Der junge Lord (1969). He died on 27 October 2012 in Dresden, Germany.- Composer
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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.- Composer
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Yôko Kanno was born on 18 March 1964 in Sendai, Japan. She is a composer and writer, known for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2002), Wolf's Rain (2003) and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001).- Music Department
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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
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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
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Rhythm and blues performer/songwriter credited with defining 1960's Chicago sound in hits like "It's All Right" and "Gypsy Woman." His style influenced other artists from pop to hip hop. Has been a quadriplegic ever since he was struck by lighting rig during outdoor concert in New York, 1990. Member of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame whose 1968 hit "We're A Winner, " became a civil rights anthem. Two-time Grammy winner whose "Superfly" soundtrack sold more than 4 million copies.- Music Department
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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
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Mario Nascimbene was born on 28 November 1913 in Milan, Lombardy, Italy. He was a composer and actor, known for The French Dispatch (2021), Matchstick Men (2003) and Violent Summer (1959). He was married to Mara Caterina Ripari and Tamara Adrian. He died on 6 January 2002 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Music Department
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Lennie Niehaus was born on 1 June 1929 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was a composer, known for Space Cowboys (2000), The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and Unforgiven (1992). He was married to Patricia Jarvis. He died on 28 May 2020 in Redlands, California, USA.- Music Department
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Basil Poledouris was born on August 21, 1945 in Kansas City. He started taking piano lessons when he was 7 years old. Eventually, he went on to become a student at USC, where he studied the arts of directing, cinematography, editing, sound and, of course, music. It was also at USC he met John Milius and Randal Kleiser, both acclaimed directors with whom he would work in the future. Even though Basil had already composed music to John Milius' much talked about Big Wednesday (1978), his real breakthrough came in 1982 when he composed the score to Milius' epic fantasy movie, Conan the Barbarian (1982). The powerful themes that Basil created for this movie opened the eyes of the movie industry, as well as the public, and it is arguably one of the best soundtracks of the 80s. Basil went on to make soundtracks for such movies as: RoboCop (1987) (the second Paul Verhoeven movie of many for which he has composed, the first being 1985's Flesh+Blood (1985)), Lonesome Dove (1989) (for which he won an Emmy), Farewell to the King (1989), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Free Willy (1993), in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (1997) with Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards and Les Misérables (1998).- Composer
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Jocelyn Pook is one of the UK's most versatile composers, having written extensively for stage, screen, opera house and concert hall. Often remembered for her film score to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which won her a Chicago Film Award and a Golden Globe nomination, she has worked with some of the world's leading directors, musicians and artists including Martin Scorsese, Peter Gabriel, Massive Attack, Laurie Anderson. Her first opera Ingerland was commissioned by ROH2 for the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio in 2010, and The BBC Proms and The King's Singers commissioned her to collaborate with Poet Laureate Andrew Motion on a work entitled Mobile. Jocelyn won an Olivier Award for the National Theatre's production of St Joan, and a British Composer Award for her multi-media music-theatre piece Speaking in Tunes. She won a second British Composer Award for her soundtrack to Akram Khan's dance production DESH. In 2014 she composed the score for his dance piece Dust choreographed for English National Ballet to mark the centenary of the First World War, as well as the score for Mike Bartlett's play King Charles III which premiered at Almeida Theatre, London and transferred to West End and Broadway NY. Her most recent ballet for English National Ballet, M-Dao, choreographed by Yabin Wang, premiered in 2016 at Sadler's Wells. In 2018 Jocelyn won a BAFTA for her score for the 2017 TV film version of King Charles III. She composed the soundtracks for The Wife, acclaimed feature film starring Glenn Close, and for The Staircase, the extraordinary documentary series directed by Jean-Xavier Lestrade. This year Pook was commissioned by The Proms to compose a new piece for Prom 49: in The Lost Words:"You Need To Listen To Us" she sets words from speeches by environmental activist Greta Thunberg to music. She also composed the soundtrack for The Kingmaker, a documentary film about the controversial political career of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, directed by Lauren Greenfield, to be released later this autumn.- Composer
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Popol Vuh is known for Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Sightseers (2012) and A Bigger Splash (2015).- Composer
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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.- Composer
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Born in Poland in 1955, Zbigniew Preisner studied philosophy and history in the university of Cracow. In his twenties he started to study music in a autodidactical way: buying records and learning to write by taking the music in parts. He started to write his own compositions. His style has always been very romantic, influenced by romantic polish composers from the XIX century and others like Paganini or Sibelius. He has always emphasized the importance of melody in music. He doesn't like experimental modern music.
In 1981 he began his collaboration with filmmakers. While he was working with Antoni Krauze's movie "Weather Report" he met director Krzystof Kieslowski who invited him to work in his new movie "No End" about Poland under the martial law at the beginning of the 80s.
With that movie he began a very close collaboration with Kieslowski and his screenwriter Krzystof Piesiewicz. He works while the script for the movie is still being written but he usually also takes part in the editing of the movie.
Their next collaboration became a success worldwide. "Decalogue" won the European film award for best film and also awards in Cannes and other festivals. Kieslowski became one of the most importants directors in Europe and Preisner the leading film music composer of his generation.
At the same time he continued his collaboration with Kieslowski in such films like "La double vie de Veronique" and the trilogy of colours ("Blue", "White" and "Red") he also wrote soundtracks for others important directors like Louis Malle, Agniezka Holland or Héctor Babenco.
His collaboration with Kieslowski ended with his death in 1996. In the last years Preisner not only has continued his collaboration in others movies but he also has been involved in others musical projects like the writing of an opera to be performed in London and features for the Varsovia Simphony orchestra.- Music Department
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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
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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.- Writer
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Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta on May 2, 1921. His father, Late Sukumar Ray was an eminent poet and writer in the history of Bengali literature. In 1940, after receiving his degree in science and economics from Calcutta University, he attended Tagore's Viswa-Bharati University. His first movie Pather Panchali (1955) won several International Awards and set Ray as a world-class director. He died on April twenty-third, 1992.- Composer
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Leonard Rosenman was born on 7 September 1924 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He was a composer, known for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), Barry Lyndon (1975) and La La Land (2016). He was married to Judie Gregg, Lyn Furr, Kay Scott and Adele Bracker. He died on 4 March 2008 in Woodland Hills, California, USA.- Composer
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Craig Safan was born on 17 December 1948 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a composer and writer, known for The Last Starfighter (1984), Cheers (1982) and Thief (1981).- Composer
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Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on 17 January 1952 in Tokyo, Japan. He was a composer and actor, known for The Last Emperor (1987), The Revenant (2015) and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983). He was married to Akiko Yano. He died on 28 March 2023 in Tokyo, Japan.- Music Department
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Immensely talented, Argentinian born pianist, conductor and composer who has written over 100 scores for both television & the cinema including the memorable themes to Mission: Impossible (1966), Mannix (1967), Starsky and Hutch (1975), Cool Hand Luke (1967), and Bullitt (1968). Schifrin has regularly worked alongside Clint Eastwood (another jazz music aficionado) on numerous contributions including the themes to all the Dirty Harry films, plus Joe Kidd (1972) and Coogan's Bluff (1968). During his illustrious career, Schifrin has received four Grammy Awards, and has received six Oscar nominations.
Schifrin received his classical music training in both Argentina & France, and is a highly respected jazz pianist. On moving back to Buenos Aires in the mid 1950s, Schifrin formed his own big band, and was noticed by jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, who asked him to become his pianist and arranger. Schifrin moved to the United States in 1958 and his career really began to take off. In addition to his jazz and cinema compositions, he has conducted the London Philarmonic Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angelas Philarmonic, the Los Angelas Chamber Orchestra and many others.
Schifrin is one of the talented and significant contributors to film music over the past 40 years, and he continues to remain active with recent compositions for the Jackie Chan films Rush Hour (1998) and Rush Hour 2 (2001).- Composer
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Ravi Shankar was a world-renowned musician, composer, performer, and scholar of classical Indian music. He was one of the leading cultural figures of the twentieth century whose accomplishments placed him as the leading figure of an important musical tradition. His long and distinguished musical career included numerous recordings, performances at all the world's leading venues, and a series of unprecedented collaborations with other leading musicians. Although he is well known because of his interaction with the popular music world, it is important to underscore that Shankar is considered the leading international figure in a very elevated art form, Hindustani music. Shankar was born on April 7, 1920, in Varanasi, India. He moved to Paris in 1930, and received most of his education there. From the age of 12, he performed as a musician and dancer on tour in Europe and America with his brother Uday Shankar, and in 1939 had his first concert as soloist at a music conference in Allahabad. By 1945 Shankar's reputation as the leading performer of traditional Hindustani music on the sitar had coalesced. He began to branch out as a composer, writing music for ballet and for important films such as such as Dharti Ke Lal and Neecha Nagar. He also composed the song Sare Jahan Se Accha, which is one of the most widely known piece of music in India. In 1949, Shankar became Music Director of All-India Radio at Delhi, and founded the Vadya Vrinda Chamber Orchestra. During the years 1950-55 Shankar composed some of his most famous music, most notably in the internationally-acclaimed film studios of Calcutta, where he scored The Ray Triology. For his outstanding contribution to Indian music and culture, he received his first of five Presidential Awards in 1962, India's highest honor in the arts. In the mid-1960s, his preeminence as one of the world's leading serious musicians was augmented with wide popular success. George Harrison of The Beatles developed a deep, abiding interest in Hindustani music, and began to study with Shankar. One influence of this study can be heard in his song Within You, Without You. Shankar died in San Diego, California in 2012 at the age of 92.- Music Department
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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
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Dmitri Shostakovich, one of Russian culture's most acclaimed intellectuals who was censored under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, was an internationally recognized composer whose music was in over 100 films.
He was born Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the second of three children of Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, a chemical engineer, and Sofia Kokaoulina, a pianist. Young Shostakovich studied piano under his mother tutelage and at a private school in St. Petersburg. His greatest influences were Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Modest Mussorgsky. From 1919-1925 he studied piano and composition at St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Conservatory. He wrote his First "Classical" symphony as his graduation piece. In 1927 he won an "honorable mention diploma" at the 1st International Piano Competition in Warsaw. In 1929 he collaborated with writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, artist Alexander Rodchenko and director Vsevolod Meyerhold.
In 1934 Shostakovich collaborated with Aleksei Dikij on the legendary opera Katerina Izmailova" (aka Lady Makbeth of Mtsensk). Dikij's production of "Katerina Izmailova" had over 100 performances in Leningrad and Moscow, and was considered a highlight in his directing career. However, in 1936, the opera was severely criticized by some critics on the Pravda, the Communist Party's official newspaper, and accused of formalism and intellectualism.
In the summer of 1941 Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, and German and Finnish forces and encircled Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Defenders and civilians in besieged Leningrad were doomed, because the besieging forces cut supplies of food and energy to the surrounded city. It wasn't long before the city's population of birds, pets and even rats were eaten, and not long after there were reports of cannibalism brought about by starvation. The siege of Leningrad was so impenetrable that by December of that year an average of 4000 to 6000 residents a day were dying of starvation, disease, shellfire, bombardment and a variety of other causes.
During the first months of the siege Shostakovich was in Leningrad. He survived the first bombardments and joined the "night watch" patrol, helping to put out fires during massive German air bombardments. Shostakovich personally neutralized several incendiary bombs and was actively involved in firefighting. After aerial and artillery bombardments, during the rare quiet moments, Shostakovich was back to his piano composing new music. He was evacuated from the besieged city in the end of 1941.
The Seventh "Leningrad" Symphony, which Shostakovich started composing during the Nazi aerial and artillery attacks during the siege, was the masterpiece that won him national and international recognition. His music helped lift the spirits of Leningrad citizens in a time when they were struggling to survive.
On August 9, 1942, Karl Eliasberg gave a premiere performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in Leningrad. That famous concert was made possible because Eliasberg specially created an orchestra of survivors who were still able to perform in spite of starvation and dystrophy.
Eliasberg, who was also extremely emaciated, spent some time in the hospital in the Astoria hotel and came to the rehearsals straight from the sick ward. On the score of one of the musicians of that legendary orchestra you can still see a drawing showing hollow-cheeked Eliasberg conducting his orchestra sitting on a chair. The legendary performance was broadcast live from the Radio Hall in Leningrad, so millions of civilians and defenders of the besieged city were able to hear the powerful music. The symphony written in the conventional four movements is Shostakovich's longest, and one of the longest in the repertoire, with performances taking approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. The scale and scope of the work is consistent with Shostakovich's other symphonies as well as with those of composers considered to be his strongest influences, including Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky.
Before they tackled Shostakovich's work, Eliasberg had the players go through pieces from the standard repertoire - Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - which they also performed for broadcast. Because the city was still blockaded at the time, the score was flown by night in early July for rehearsal. The concert was given on 9 August 1942. Whether this date was chosen intentionally, it was the day Hitler had chosen previously to celebrate the fall of Leningrad with a lavish reception for the top Nazi commanders. But instead of Hitler's plan, all loudspeakers delivered the live broadcast of the symphony performance throughout the city as well as to the German forces in a move of psychological warfare. The Russian commander of the Leningrad front, General Govorov, ordered a bombardment of German artillery positions in advance of the broadcast to ensure their silence during the performance of the symphony; a special operation, code-named "Squall," was executed for precisely this purpose. Three thousand high-caliber shells were lobbed onto the enemy. Then the music of Shostakovich came out of the speakers all over the siege perimeter, so the Nazis had to face the music. The music of Shostakovich brought the much needed support and catharsis to survivors who loved the symphony and applauded to Eliasberg and his orchestra. General Govorov with his staff came backstage to thank Eliasberg and his musicians for their art and courage.
The news about Dmitry Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony premiere in besieged Leningrad spread all over the world. It was an important message to all nations that Hitler's attack on Leningrad failed. Shostakovich who began to write his famous symphony before evacuation from besieged Leningrad in 1941, could not go back to attend its premier performance in 1942. The composer sent the conductor and the musicians who performed his work in the besieged city a telegram with words of gratitude.
After WWII Shostakovich was again accused of formalism in 1948. At that time, Shostakovich gained international recognition in the free world, and received several invitations to participate in music festivals and other cultural events. He was awarded the International Peace Prize (1954), State Prize five times (in 1941-1952), State Prizes of Russia and the USSR, and was designated People's Artist of the USSR. From 1957-1975 he was secretary of the Union of Composers of Russia and the USSR. He taught and promoted many talented musicians, such as Andrey Petrov, Georgi Sviridov, Karen Khachaturyan, and Boris Tishchenko among others.
Shostakovich and Yevgeniy Yevtushenko worked together on the famous Symphony No. 13 titled "Babi Yar", a vocal setting of poems by Yevtushenko. It was first performed in Moscow on December 18, 1962 under the baton of Kirill Kondrashin. Yevtushenko and Shostakovich toured many countries with the performances of "Babi Yar", and made several recordings of the Symphony No. 13. Among Shostakovich's best known film scores are 'Suite from The Gadfly' from The Gadfly (1955), and the score for director Grigoriy Kozintsev's acclaimed film Hamlet (1964) starring Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy.
In 1965 Shostakovich raised his voice in defense of poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to five years of exile and hard labor. Shostakovich co-signed protests together with such prominent figures as Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. After the protests his sentence was commuted, and Brodsky returned to Leningrad. At that time, Shostakovich joined the group of 25 distinguished intellectuals in signing the letter to Leonid Brezhnev asking not to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin.
Dmitri Shostakovich was a towering figure in Russian music of the 20th century along with 'Sergei Prokofiev (I)' and Aram Khachaturyan. He wrote 15 symphonies, of which the Fifth (1937), the Sevenths "Leningrad" (1942), and the Thurteenth "Baby Yar" (1968) are the best known. His other compositions include cantatas and oratorios, seven operas and operettas, four ballets, twelve musical comedies and other music for stage plays, 36 original motion picture scores, fifteen quartets and other chamber music for, piano, violin, and cello. Shostakovich, who was an awarded pianist himself, had composed outstanding works for piano, such as his Piano concertos No1 and No2. His 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano received numerous awards and recognitions, and were recorded in critically acclaimed performance by Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Shostakovich died of a heart attack on august 9, 1975, in Moscow, and was laid to rest in Novodevichi Convent Cemetery in Moscow, Russia. His legacy is continued by his son, conductor Maxim Shostakovich, and his grandson, pianist Dmitri Shostakovich Jr.- Composer
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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
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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.- Composer
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Tôru Takemitsu was born on 8 October 1930 in Tokyo, Japan. He was a composer, known for Harakiri (1962), Ran (1985) and Rising Sun (1993). He died on 20 February 1996 in Tokyo, Japan.- Composer
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Vangelis was a composer and performer who worked almost exclusively with electronic instruments. With Jean-Michel Jarre and Mike Oldfield in the 1970s, Vangelis was a pioneer in the instrumental music and a main influence in the creation of the musical genre "new age," a style related to spiritual, meditation, relaxing ambient sounds as well as sounds from outer space. He was probably most well known for his Chariots of Fire (1981), Blade Runner (1982), The Bounty (1984) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) soundtracks or for the tracks used in the documentary TV series Cosmos (1980) created, produced and hosted by scientist Carl Sagan. Vangelis was involved in many musical collaborations, most famously with British progressive rock band Yes's founding member Jon Anderson.- Music Department
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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
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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
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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.