Martin Phipps

Martin Phipps stands among Britain’s foremost composers of music for both the large and small screen, having supplied the soundtracks for multiple seasons of the BBC hit The Crown. Born in London on August 1, 1968, he is the son of Jack Phipps and Sue Pears, who ran a music agency representing clients such as Benjamin Britten; the composer served as the younger Phipps’s godfather. Sue Pears was also a niece of singer Peter Pears, another artist on the agency’s roster. Although Phipps began university studies in drama at Manchester, he later changed his focus to music and secured a staff composer post at the BBC in 1994. His initial score to attract broad attention accompanied the 1999 miniseries Eureka Street, which examined life in Northern Ireland after the 1994 peace accords.

Further BBC assignments followed, including North & South in 2004 and The Virgin Queen the next year; the latter brought him an Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Score. A second Ivor Novello, this time for Best Television Soundtrack, arrived in 2008 for the BBC’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Phipps also composed for television versions of two Jane Austen novels, Persuasion on ITV and Sense and Sensibility on the BBC. His music for the mystery series Wallander, which ran from 2008 to 2015, earned a BAFTA Craft Award for Best Original TV Score in 2009, and he received the same honor the following year for the television film Small Island.

Although Phipps continued to accept television projects, such as the 2016 BBC miniseries adaptation of Tolstoy’s War & Peace, he devoted increasing time to feature films. Among these were Endgame (2009), starring William Hurt and centered on the close of South Africa’s apartheid era, Brighton Rock (2010), the documentary Britain in a Day (2011), and the biographical drama Woman in Gold (2015). The greater part of his work in the late 2010s and early 2020s centered on The Crown, the six-season chronicle of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign; he created the scores for its third, fourth, and fifth seasons.