Andrew Douglas

Born on 19 June 1920 in Hackney, London, and passing away on 20 April 2003 in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, Douglas earned recognition as a highly productive composer and arranger whose extensive body of work encompassed numerous film and television scores. He collaborated in the studio with a wide array of leading vocalists, achieving sales of several million albums, among them eighty releases issued by RCA Records.

Displaying early promise at the piano, he assembled a dance band during his school years and, upon completing his education, performed with the Neville Hughes sextet. Wartime service in the RAF resulted in an injury that temporarily halted his piano performances, prompting a shift toward composition and arrangement. Postwar demand for his skills came from Bert Ambrose, Ted Heath, Edmundo Ros, Cyril Stapleton, Billy Cotton, Joe Loss, Mantovani, Jack Parnell and additional leading British ensembles. He also provided accompaniment for Howard Keel, Shirley Jones, Moira Anderson, Shirley Bassey, Max Bygraves, Al Martino, John Hanson, Dennis Lotis, Barbra Streisand, Vera Lynn, Tex Ritter (appearing on the 1952 hit ‘High Noon’), Harry Secombe and Frankie Vaughan, together with numerous further artists. His musical support extended to many international performers across television and radio broadcasts, and in 1955 he received the first of several BBC Radio programmes titled In The Still Of The Night.

The year 1958 marked his initial opportunity to lead a large orchestra in performances of his own arrangements. The RCA release Living Strings Play Music Of The Sea inaugurated an extended and fruitful partnership with the label. Douglas contributed scores to more than thirty feature films, among them the widely noted 1970 production The Railway Children, which earned a British Academy nomination; further titles encompassed The Day Of The Triffids, The Hijackers, The Bay Of Saint Michel, Gunfighters Of Casa Grande, Mozambique, Crack In The World, City Of Fear, Kid Rodelo, Dateline Diamonds, Circus Of Fear, Company Of Fools, Run Like A Thief and twenty-one entries in the Scales Of Justice series. In 1983 he established his own label, Dulcima, whose name derived from a film score he had composed for an adaptation of an H.E. Bates work. Recording activity persisted into the following decade, culminating in 1999 with his first classical piece, the three-movement symphonic poem The Conquest. After battling prostate cancer over several years, Douglas died in April 2003.