John Powell

English composer John Powell, now based in Los Angeles, creates film scores that lean heavily toward animated features and science-fiction or action pictures. After breaking through with Face/Off, he supplied music for the Jason Bourne series and the Ice Age franchise. Additional honors encompass several Saturn, BAFTA, and Annie Award nominations, a 2008 Grammy nomination for the animated penguin film Happy Feet, and an Oscar nomination in 2011 for How to Train Your Dragon.

Powell entered the world in London in 1963 and first worked in television, scoring the British series Stay Lucky from 1989 to 1993 before handling a single season of the U.S. police drama High Incident in 1996. He reached the cinema in 1997 with his inaugural score, attached to John Woo’s action film Face/Off that starred Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. During the early 2000s he joined Hans Zimmer on The Road to El Dorado and partnered with Harry Gregson-Williams on Chicken Run, the initial entry in an extended DreamWorks collaboration. Both composers became colleagues after Powell joined Remote Control Productions, the Santa Monica firm established by Jay Rifkin and Zimmer. Further joint projects with Zimmer included the 1999 release Chill Factor and the first two Kung Fu Panda pictures, while the pair’s work with Gregson-Williams continued with the 2001 release Shrek.

Powell joined The Bourne Identity in 2002 and remained with the series through the following decade. Much of his early-aughts output stayed within high-velocity action territory on titles such as The Italian Job, Agent Cody Banks, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. In 2006 he assumed scoring duties for the Ice Age series and co-composed Happy Feet with Gia Farrell, an effort that earned a Grammy nomination in 2008. Other late-aughts credits comprised X-Men: The Last Stand, P.S. I Love You, Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, Kung Fu Panda, and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Powell opened 2010 with How to Train Your Dragon, which received an Academy Award nomination the next year. In 2011 he continued with sequels for both Kung Fu Panda and Happy Feet while initiating work on the new animated property Rio. Further installments of Ice Age, Rio, How to Train Your Dragon, and Bourne occupied him through 2016. In 2018 he briefly succeeded John Williams on the score for Solo: A Star Wars Story.