Adolph Deutsch

Born in London and brought to the United States as a child, Adolph Deutsch trained in music from an early age and made his way as an orchestrator and arranger on Broadway in the 1920s and early 1930s, working on shows by Irving Berlin and the Gershwins. That apprenticeship in the theater gave him an unusually secure command of the orchestra, and by the late 1930s he had settled into the Warner Bros. music department at the height of the studio's gritty, urban prime.

There Deutsch became a defining voice of the studio's tough, shadowed dramas, scoring John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, Raoul Walsh's High Sierra, and The Mask of Dimitrios - lean, propulsive music for a world of gangsters, private eyes, and doomed schemes. He served for years as a fixture of the Warner sound and was elected the first president of the Screen Composers' Association, advocating for the professional standing of his fellow film musicians.

In the 1950s he moved to MGM and reinvented his career in the unlikeliest direction, becoming one of the studio's premier musical directors during the golden age of the Freed Unit. Adapting and conducting the scores of the era's great stage musicals, he won three Academy Awards in the space of six years - for Annie Get Your Gun, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Oklahoma! - and worked on some of the most beloved musicals ever filmed, including Show Boat and The Band Wagon. He also scored Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, reuniting with the director late in his career. A meticulous, versatile professional equally at home in a smoky crime film and a Technicolor production number, he retired in the early 1960s and died in Palm Desert, California, in 1980, remembered as one of the studio era's most quietly accomplished all-rounders.