Harry Sukman

Chicago-born prodigy Harry Sukman first appeared on the concert stage in 1925 when he was twelve years old. While still attending high school he accompanied violinists Mischa Mischakoff and Louis Persinger as well as cantor Joseph Rosenblatt. Radio later employed him as both pianist and conductor before he relocated to Hollywood in 1946. There he entered Paramount’s music department as a staff pianist and came under the guidance of its leader, Victor Young. Throughout the closing years of the 1940s and the opening half of the 1950s he honed his craft scoring motion pictures, yet he also performed and recorded with Victor Young’s orchestra, contributed piano work to Frank Sinatra sessions, and wrote songs in partnership with Peggy Lee. The bulk of his screen assignments came from independent producers; his speed and skill at reshaping existing material—skills he displayed on Samuel Fuller’s Verboten—proved especially useful on several major 1960s projects. One of these was Song Without End, for which he adapted the music of Franz Liszt and shared an Academy Award with Morris W. Stoloff. Two further Oscar nominations followed, for Fanny in 1961 and The Singing Nun in 1966. By then television occupied as much of his schedule as feature films. At Universal he scored episodes of The Virginian and Tales of Wells Fargo; at MGM he assumed duties on Dr. Kildare from Jerry Goldsmith, preserving but reworking the original theme, and continued with the series’ spinoff The Eleventh Hour. Additional credits included The High Chaparral and a season of Bonanza. His final assignment was the 1979 Tobe Hooper television film Salem’s Lot, a horror project unlike most of the work he had done across thirty-five years. The score brought him an Emmy nomination. Decades afterward, Sukman’s childhood and lifelong devotion to the piano inspired the children’s book Harry’s Piano, written by his daughter Suzanne Sukman McCray, a casting director whose credits encompass Mannix, Hawaii 5-O, Happy Days, Little House on the Prairie, and Father Murphy.