Stanley Myers

Stanley Myers launched his career scoring British television programs including Z-Cars and Doctor Who, quickly establishing himself as a prolific and remarkably adaptable composer equally at home with understated classical textures or vigorous action passages. His most widely recognized contribution remains the music for The Deer Hunter, above all the lyrical “Cavatina,” which has been recorded numerous times by other artists, yet he also gained recognition for his work on multiple Nicholas Roeg features, among them Insignificance, whose soundtrack album has remained sought-after since its original issue.

His earliest cinema assignment arrived with the 1966 production Kaleidoscope, followed the next year by Ulysses. From 1968 onward he secured steady footing in motion pictures, shuttling between projects on both sides of the Atlantic at an exceptional rate. At the time of his death from cancer in 1993 he had accumulated more than one hundred film and television scoring credits, while still finding time to compose a substantial body of non-cinematic music.

Early in the 1980s he took on Hans Zimmer as an assistant, and the two eventually shared writing duties on several scores. Even while battling illness Myers kept working almost to the end, completing his last assignment for the TNT television adaptation of Heart of Darkness, again under Nicholas Roeg’s direction.