Williams

John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is one of the most widely recognized composers of film scores. As of 2007, he has received 45 Academy Award nominations, an accomplishment surpassed only by Walt Disney. more...

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Williams is best known for heroic, rousing themes to adventure and fantasy films. These include some of the highest grossing films of all time, such as Star Wars, Superman, Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, and the first three Harry Potter movies. His richly thematic and highly popular 1977 score to the first Star Wars film was selected in 2005 by the American Film Institute as the greatest American movie score of all time. In that list of 25, he had Star Wars and two others. So far, five of his film scores have won Oscars.

His long career has also included many sensitive dramatic scores (such as Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan) and more experimental concert works. As of March 2006, his latest works include the scores for the recent movies Munich and Memoirs of a Geisha.

While skilled in a variety of twentieth-century compositional idioms, his most familiar style may be described as a form of neoromanticism, inspired by the large-scale orchestral music of the late 19th century, especially Wagnerian music and leitmotif, and that of Williams's film-composing predecessors.

Early life and family

John Williams was born in Floral Park, New York. In 1948 he moved with his family to Los Angeles, California, where he attended North Hollywood High School and later UCLA. He also studied composition privately with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who also taught another famous film score composer, Jerry Goldsmith.

In 1952, Williams was drafted and entered the United States Air Force, where he conducted and arranged music for Air Force bands. When discharged in 1954, he returned to New York. There, he went to Juilliard, the alma mater of musicians including the composer Philip Glass and violinist Itzhak Perlman (with whom Williams released an album, Cinema Serenade, in 1997). He studied piano at the school with Rosina Lhevinne. In New York, he worked as a jazz pianist. He also played with noted composer Henry Mancini and even performed on the recording of the famous Peter Gunn theme. In the early 1960s, he served as arranger/bandleader on a series of popular albums with singer Frankie Laine.

Williams was married to his first wife, actress Barbara Ruick, from 1956 until her death on March 3, 1974. They had three children together. He married his second wife, Samantha Winslow, on June 9, 1980, to whom he remains married to this day.

Film scoring

Williams later returned to Los Angeles, where he started working in the film studios. There he worked as an orchestrator with some of the finest film score composers of that time: Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, and Alfred Newman. He also lent his talents as a studio pianist, performing in scores by the likes of Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein. He began his career composing TV scores for series including Lost in Space (as "Johnny" Williams) and The Time Tunnel. The release of some of those scores on CD reveal finely-crafted techniques and patterns that anticipate his most famous works.

Read more at Wikipedia.org