James Horner

Famed for crafting expansive, richly textured film scores for such pictures as Braveheart, Apollo 13, and Titanic, composer James Horner entered the world in Los Angeles on August 14, 1953. His training took him first to London’s Royal College of Music and later to USC and UCLA, after which he began receiving screen assignments in the 1970s, among them the B-movies The Lady in Red, Humanoids of the Deep, and Battle Beyond the Stars, all produced under Roger Corman’s New World banner. By 1982 he had advanced to higher-profile studio projects, including 48 Hrs. and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; four years afterward came his initial Academy Award nominations, earned for the science-fiction classic Aliens and for the song “Somewhere Out There” from the animated feature An American Tail. In 1989 he received a further Oscar nod for the score to Field of Dreams, while also claiming a Grammy for his contributions to the Civil War drama Glory; 1995 brought two additional Academy Award nominations, this time for Braveheart and Apollo 13.

Horner finally captured Academy Awards in 1997, winning for both his music to the blockbuster Titanic and the film’s chart-topping original song “My Heart Will Go On,” performed by Celine Dion. Additional scores from that era encompassed Commando and The New World. In 2006 the compilation Film Music Masterworks: Original Soundtracks appeared, gathering selections from Apollo 13, Braveheart, Willow, Titanic, and other Horner favorites. Although his output during the 2000s proved less voluminous than the preceding decade, he maintained a high standard, securing three more Oscar nominations for A Beautiful Mind (2001), House of Sand and Fog (2003), and Avatar (2009), whose box-office scale nearly matched that of Titanic. He also composed the theme for the CBS Evening News, a melody familiar to millions of daily listeners. Horner remained sought after well into the new century, supplying music for major releases such as The Amazing Spider-Man and Ender’s Game. The year 2012 brought a deluxe four-disc, 25th-anniversary edition of Titanic, recognized as the most commercially successful orchestral score album ever released. On June 22, 2015, at age 61, Horner perished when the single-engine turboprop he was flying solo crashed in California’s Los Padres National Forest west of Santa Barbara.