James Horner, who has died aged 61 in a plane crash in California, was one of the most successful and admired composers of film soundtracks in Hollywood. He wrote music for more than 100 films, and his extensive list of awards included two Academy Awards and two Golden Globes, as well as 10 Oscar nominations, seven nominations for Golden Globes and three for Bafta awards.
Horner’s music was an integral part of some of the most successful films of recent decades. His score for James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) won an Oscar for best original dramatic score, and he also won best original song for My Heart Will Go On, the love theme from Titanic, which was co-written with Will Jennings and sung by Celine Dion. It became a huge hit in its own right, selling 15m copies. The recording of Horner’s Titanic score also sold 27m copies. He had previously collaborated with Cameron on Aliens (1986), which had earned him his first Oscar nomination, and on the score for Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi fantasy Avatar, which was also nominated.
There were several films with Mel Gibson, of which Braveheart (bringing another Oscar nomination) was the most prominent. His Braveheart score, like his work on Titanic, showcased Horner’s fondness for folk and ethnic musical influences. But he would also cite composers such as Britten, Prokofiev and Tallis as influences on his work.
He formed a successful partnership with the director Ron Howard, and his work on Apollo 13 (1995) and A Beautiful Mind (2001) again put him on the Oscars shortlist. With Edward Zwick, a director Horner described as “very difficult and very opinionated”, he worked on Glory (1989) and Legends of the Fall (1994), earning Golden Globe nominations for each.
Horner was born in Los Angeles to Joan (nee Frankel) and Harry. His father, who had been born in Czechoslovakia, moved to the US in 1935, and was an art director and set designer who won Oscars for his work on The Heiress (1949) and The Hustler (1961). James began playing the piano when he was five, and was sent to study at the Royal College of Music in London. He returned to Los Angeles, took a bachelor’s degree in music at the University of Southern California, and went on to postgraduate work at University of California, Los Angeles.
He began his film career in the late 1970s by working on shorts for the American Film Institute, and wrote his first full-length score for 1979’s The Lady in Red (directed by Lewis Teague, but re-released by Roger Corman in 1980 as Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin). After cutting his teeth on films such as Oliver Stone’s horror flick The Hand (1981), he made the leap to large-scale popular work with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Walter Hill’s buddy-cops yarn, 48 Hrs (1982), and Michael Apted’s well-received 1983 film version of Martin Cruz Smith’s novel Gorky Park.
That same year he wrote the score for The Dresser, Peter Yates’s adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s West End and Broadway play. He knew Harwood’s daughter, Alex, now a film composer herself, from his time studying in London. “I remember my father coming back from a visit to James when he was studying at UCLA, and saying he had heard his music and it was all bumps and squeaks,” she explained. “Dad asked ‘where are the melodies, James?’ and that was a joke for years in our family. Then he became a film composer and he was writing these incredible melodies.”
She recalled him as “a lovely person and incredibly gifted, though obviously deep down incredibly driven,” adding that he was “one of the last of that old school of composers, like John Williams, with proper classical training and unbelievable musical knowledge”.
In 1985 came Horner’s first collaboration with Howard, on Cocoon, the whimsical tale of a group of senior citizens in Florida being rejuvenated by aliens. Cameron’s Aliens followed, as well as An American Tail (1986, another Oscar-nominated project for Horner) and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s medieval detective story, The Name of the Rose (1986). Annaud became another regular partner and the pair later worked together on Enemy at the Gates (2001) and 2011’s Day of the Falcon.
Alongside his involvement in heavyweight drama productions, Horner worked on music for a string of children’s and animated films, including The Rocketeer (1991), We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993), Casper (1995), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000). He perhaps enjoyed these as a respite from the demands that often came with major products for big-name directors; he was also regularly bedevilled by producers, whom he criticised for being too interventionist, particularly on The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012.
At the time of his death Horner had three films slated for release in 2015: the boxing drama Southpaw, Annaud’s Wolf Totem, and The 33. But he was not solely concerned with film work. In 2014 he premiered his double concerto for violin and cello in Liverpool, and in March this year he unveiled his concerto for four horns at the South Bank in London.
He is survived by his wife, Sarah, and their two daughters.
James Roy Horner, composer, born 14 August 1953; died 22 June 2015
