Jerry Goldsmith

Horns played with reversed mouthpieces and an electric harp processed through an Echoplex were among the sounds Jerry Goldsmith used in Planet of the Apes, one of more than two hundred scores across five decades. His film scores included Chinatown and Alien; The Omen brought him the Academy Award in 1977 — his only win against eighteen nominations. Raised in Los Angeles, he studied theory and counterpoint with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco as a teenager and entered the industry as a clerk typist at CBS, graduating to radio drama and then television before his first feature in 1957. Patton, five Star Trek films and Basic Instinct mark the later range. His last completed film scores included Looney Tunes: Back in Action in 2003. Born in 1929 to a family of Romanian Jews, he began the piano at six, studied privately with Jacob Gimpel, and turned to film after hearing Miklós Rózsa's score for Spellbound, later following Rózsa's courses at the University of Southern California. His first feature score was the western Black Patch in 1957, and an Academy Award nomination for Freud came in 1963, by which time Alfred Newman had recommended him to Universal for Lonely Are the Brave. Poltergeist, Gremlins, L.A. Confidential and Mulan lie among the later work, much of it made with directors such as Robert Wise, Joe Dante and Ridley Scott; he died of cancer in Beverly Hills on 21 July 2004. His concert music included Fireworks, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the Hollywood Bowl in 1999.