Thomas Newman

A second-generation figure in Hollywood's storied musical lineage, Grammy-winning composer Thomas Newman has sustained his family's tradition via numerous Academy Award-nominated film scores. An adaptable artist comfortable across electro-acoustic rock, intimate chamber settings, lighthearted orchestral pieces, sweeping grandeur, rustic folk, buoyant jazz, and restless electronic textures, Newman launched his feature career in 1984 with the romantic comedy Reckless. His initial Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score arrived ten years afterward, covering both 1994 releases The Shawshank Redemption and Little Women when the awards took place in 1995. Scores for such varied projects as Best Picture recipient American Beauty (1999), Disney-Pixar's Finding Nemo (2003), and the James Bond entry Skyfall (2012) added to his list of nominations. Along the way he earned an Emmy for the main theme of the HBO drama Six Feet Under. A multi-Grammy recipient, Newman claimed his sixth Recording Academy honor in 2014 for the Skyfall score. He has worked repeatedly with American Beauty director Sam Mendes; their seventh collaboration, the 2019 war drama 1917, brought Newman a fifteenth Oscar nomination. The pair reunited for 2022's Empire of Light.

Born in Los Angeles in 1955, Thomas Montgomery Newman is the son of Alfred Newman and the nephew of Lionel and Emil Newman, three celebrated composers and conductors from Hollywood's golden era. (Thomas's brother David likewise entered the family profession, as did their cousin, the wry singer/songwriter Randy Newman.) Having studied piano and violin during childhood, he later enrolled at the University of Southern California to pursue composition and orchestration under David Raskin and Frederick Lesemann. Newman earned a master's degree in composition from Yale in 1978.

Although Stephen Sondheim championed his early musical-theater effort Three Mean Fairy Tales, Newman devoted much of the late 1970s to keyboard duties in the rock group the Innocents and the improvisational ensemble Tokyo 77. He entered the film world in 1983 by orchestrating a John Williams cue for Return of the Jedi, then delivered his first complete score, Reckless, the next year.

The music for his fourth picture, the 1985 Madonna vehicle Desperately Seeking Susan, marked his breakthrough, after which Newman refined an electro-orchestral style on later assignments such as 1987's The Lost Boys and Less Than Zero. Subsequent films including Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), The Player (1992), and Scent of a Woman (1992) preceded a pair of Oscar nominations for his 1994 work on The Shawshank Redemption and Little Women. One year later he received another nomination for Unstrung Heroes.

His fourth Oscar bid came with 1999's American Beauty. Distinguished by its new-agey atmosphere and tonal percussion, the then-unconventional soundtrack album earned the Grammy for Best Score. Newman garnered further Academy Award nominations in the following years for Road to Perdition (2002), Finding Nemo (2003), and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004). Two additional Grammys arrived for his Emmy-winning Six Feet Under theme, in the categories of Best Instrumental Composition and Best Instrumental Arrangement. His eighth Oscar nomination was for The Good German (2006), succeeded by nominations for WALL-E (2008), Skyfall (2012), and Saving Mr. Banks (2013). WALL-E also yielded a nomination for "Down to Earth," a collaboration with Peter Gabriel that marked Newman's debut in the song category. Although the Oscar eluded him, he secured two further Grammys for WALL-E and Skyfall.

Newman went on to supply notable scores for other critically praised films, among them the documentary He Named Me Malala, Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (another Oscar nominee), and a second James Bond installment, Spectre, all released in 2015. He next rejoined Disney-Pixar for the Finding Nemo sequel, 2016's Finding Dory. That same year he scored the space drama Passengers, whose experimental electronics secured his fourteenth Oscar nomination. His music for the biopic Tolkien and for Mendes's 1917 both reached theaters in 2019; 1917 brought yet another Academy Award nomination, while the Emmys recognized his theme for the Stephen King series Castle Rock with a nomination.

Opening the following decade, Newman wrote the jazzy score for 2020's Let Them All Talk, then turned to the crime thriller The Little Things (2021) and the World War II drama Operation Mincemeat (2021). His 2022 output encompassed actor Channing Tatum's directorial debut, Dog, and the Mendes romance Empire of Light.