Rachel Portman, the composer from Surrey, England, has earned Oscars and Emmys for her work in film and television, where she is recognized for gentle orchestral writing on literary adaptations yet equally ready to integrate varied cultural traditions and shifting emotional palettes when projects require them. Her career began with BBC assignments in the 1980s and expanded to feature films such as the 1993 adaptations Ethan Frome and The Joy Luck Club; her score for the 1996 screen version of Jane Austen’s Emma then made her the first woman to receive the Academy Award for Best Original Score. Additional nominations followed for The Cider House Rules in 1999 and Chocolat in 2000, both of which also received Grammy nominations. Other notable credits include the 1993 romantic comedy Benny & Joon, the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and the 2013 Diablo Cody comedy-drama Paradise, while her 2015 Emmy for the television film Bessie, a portrait of blues singer Bessie Smith, again marked her as the first female composer to win in the scoring category. She routinely prepares full orchestrations for her own scores.
Born Rachel Mary Berkeley Portman in Haslemere in 1960, she displayed early musical aptitude, studying piano, violin, and organ before starting to compose during her teenage years. At Oxford University she pursued formal music studies, never anticipating screen work until a student film commission led to her first professional opportunity. That project, the 1982 feature Privileged, was acquired by the BBC and featured a young Hugh Grant; the experience prompted further BBC engagements. In 1986 she scored the British Jim Henson pilot The Storyteller and continued with eight additional episodes across 1987 and 1988. Recognition arrived in 1988 with the British Film Institute’s Young Composer of the Year award and the Carlton Award for Creative Originality for Women in Film, followed by British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominations for The Woman in Black in 1989, the 1990 miniseries Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1991.
Director Beeban Kidron, with whom she had already collaborated and would work again, invited her to Hollywood in 1992 for Used People, starring Shirley MacLaine and Marcello Mastroianni. Subsequent 1993 releases Ethan Frome, Benny & Joon, and The Joy Luck Club brought her into contact with Asian musical traditions through the latter’s narrative of Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco; later, Jonathan Demme requested that Beloved, released in 1998, avoid conventional European instruments. The 1994 comedy Sirens again paired her with Hugh Grant. In 1995 she married director Uberto Pasolini and began raising a family. Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Emma reached theaters in 1996, and the following year Portman became the first woman awarded the Oscar for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score. Grammy nominations for Best Score Soundtrack accompanied her scores for The Cider House Rules and Chocolat. After Chocolat she contributed music to more than a dozen features, among them Mona Lisa Smile in 2003, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate in 2004, Because of Winn-Dixie in 2005, and The Duchess in 2008; in 2010 she received the title of OBE.
Further assignments included the Wayne Wang co-production Snow Flower and the Secret Fan in 2011, Bel Ami in 2012, Diablo Cody’s Paradise in 2013, and Dolphin Tale 2 in 2014. Her Emmy for Bessie in 2015 reaffirmed her pioneering status among female composers. Later decade highlights encompassed Race in 2016 and A Dog’s Purpose in 2017.
