Walter Scharf

Biography

Walter Scharf (Manhattan, 1910 - Los Angeles, 2003) was an American musician best known as a composer, arranger and conductor for film, television and the concert hall. His career linked the Broadway stage with the studio system of Hollywood, and it shows how studio scores were assembled during the classic and post-classic eras.

The son of Yiddish theatre comic Bessie Zwerling, he worked in the 1920s as one of the orchestrators of George Gershwin's musical Girl Crazy, and as accompanist and arranger for singers such as Helen Morgan and Rudy Vallee. He moved to Hollywood in 1933, arranging songs for Al Jolson, Alice Faye and Bing Crosby, and orchestrated the original version of Irving Berlin's White Christmas for Holiday Inn (1942). From 1942 to 1946 he headed the music department at Republic Pictures. He received ten Oscar nominations for musical direction, among them for Hans Christian Andersen, Funny Girl and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

His range shows in his work with Harold Lloyd, Jerry Lewis and Elvis Presley, where comic themes met big orchestral passages. With lyricist Don Black he wrote the hit song from Ben (1972), which won him a Golden Globe, and he scored Walking Tall (1973) and its sequels. On television, his scores for Jacques Cousteau's documentaries earned him two Emmys.

After leaving film and television in the 1980s, he returned to concert writing with works such as The Tree Still Stands (1989). He died in Brentwood, Los Angeles, at the age of 92.

Key films

• Winchester '73 (1950), a Western with a score by Scharf
• The Nutty Professor (1963), Jerry Lewis's Jekyll and Hyde comedy
• Ben (1972), whose title song won him a Golden Globe
• Walking Tall (1973), the action drama that launched a franchise
• Loving You (1957), one of the Elvis Presley films he worked on