John Williams

Biography

John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932, in Floral Park, New York) is an American composer and conductor, and also a pianist and trombonist. Over a career that has spanned seven decades, he has written some of the most famous film scores in history, and his name is closely tied to Star Wars, to Steven Spielberg's films and to the first Harry Potter movies. His importance lies as much in the number of films he has scored as in the way many of his themes have become part of popular culture.

He grew up in a musical household. His father was a jazz percussionist who played with the Raymond Scott Quintet. In 1948 the Williams family moved to Los Angeles, and John graduated from North Hollywood High School in 1950. He then studied at the University of California, where he took private composition lessons with the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. His training covered piano, trombone, trumpet and clarinet, and in those years he also played jazz piano in New York clubs.

Between 1952 and 1955 he served in the United States Air Force, where he arranged and conducted music for the Air Force band. After his discharge he moved to New York and enrolled at the Juilliard School, where he studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne. He had first hoped to become a concert pianist, but after hearing performances by John Browning and Van Cliburn he turned his attention to composition. In the meantime he worked as a jazz pianist and as an arranger for singers such as Frankie Laine and Vic Damone.

Back in Los Angeles he began working as an orchestrator at the film studios. In this period he worked with veterans of Hollywood scoring, including Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman, and he played piano on scores by Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith. He also worked on the recordings of Mancini's Peter Gunn and Days of Wine and Roses. In the late 1950s he started writing for television, with series such as Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, and his first film scores were comedies such as How to Steal a Million, starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole.

His move into major film work came with Fiddler on the Roof, for which he won his first Academy Award in 1971. Afterwards, the success of The Poseidon Adventure in 1972 associated him with disaster movies, a label the industry then imposed on him. His scores for Images and The Long Goodbye showed a range that moved from jazz to symphonic writing, and his work on The Towering Inferno and Earthquake strengthened his reputation in the genre.

The turning point came in 1974, when Steven Spielberg, making his directing debut with The Sugarland Express, asked for him after hearing his scores for The Reivers and The Cowboys. The two worked together again a year later on Jaws. Williams proposed a theme built on two alternating notes, which Spielberg initially took as something of a joke; after hearing variations on it, the director accepted the idea, and the film became a landmark. The score earned Williams his second Oscar and his first BAFTA, Golden Globe and Grammy awards.

In the same period Spielberg recommended him to George Lucas for Star Wars. Williams wrote a large symphonic score, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, influenced by the Golden Age composers Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. His use of the leitmotif, with themes tied to characters, places and objects, is a central feature of his style and of the original trilogy. The score was a commercial success and won him his third Oscar. He then scored The Empire Strikes Back, which introduced the Imperial March associated with Darth Vader, and Return of the Jedi.

His collaboration with Spielberg continued with Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which earned him his fourth Oscar, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan and Munich. With Schindler's List he won his fifth and, so far, last Oscar. The work was emotionally demanding for him: he reportedly told Spielberg that he should find a better composer, and the director replied that all the better ones were dead. Williams asked the violinist Itzhak Perlman to perform the film's main theme.

In the new millennium he scored the first three Harry Potter films, and his "Hedwig's Theme" was used in every film of the series. He also wrote music for other directors, including Alfred Hitchcock on Family Plot and Richard Donner on Superman. His later credits include Catch Me If You Can, Lincoln and The Adventures of Tintin, his first animated score. In 2015 he composed Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and in 2019 The Rise of Skywalker closed his work on the franchise.

Beyond film, Williams has had a major career as a conductor. From 1980 to 1993 he was principal conductor of the Boston Pops, succeeding Arthur Fiedler, and he is now its laureate conductor. He has also written more than fifty concert works, including concertos for cello, trumpet, clarinet and tuba, and he has composed music for four Olympic Games. His friendships with musicians such as Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma are reflected in several pieces dedicated to them.

His legacy is that of a composer who brought symphonic Romanticism into modern cinema. He has won five Academy Awards, four Golden Globes and numerous Grammys, and in 2020 he received the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts, shared with Ennio Morricone. In 2022 Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary knight. He is still active. Although he announced in 2022 that he planned to retire, he later reconsidered and continues to compose, with projects including the score for Disclosure Day, his thirtieth collaboration with Spielberg.

Key films

• Jaws (1975), with a two-note theme that became a shorthand for danger.
• Star Wars (1977), with a large symphonic score and the Imperial March of the saga.
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), his fourth Oscar and the second of the three he won with Spielberg.
• Schindler's List (1993), his fifth and so far last Oscar, with a theme performed by Itzhak Perlman.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), the start of his work on the series and the origin of "Hedwig's Theme".