Alex North

Born Isadore Soifer in Chester, Pennsylvania, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alex North took a road into film music unlike almost anyone else's. He studied at Juilliard and then, remarkably, at the Moscow Conservatory in the early 1930s, absorbing Soviet ideas about music for theater and the masses. Back home he wrote for the leftist dance and theater world, collaborating with Anna Sokolow, Martha Graham, and others, and composed serious concert music before Elia Kazan, whom he had known in the New York theater, brought him to Hollywood.

His first major film changed the medium. For A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951 North wrote a raw, bluesy, jazz-inflected score that mirrored the sweat and neurosis of Tennessee Williams's world - widely regarded as the first substantial use of the jazz idiom in a dramatic Hollywood film, and an influence on everything that followed. He proved just as commanding on the grandest scale, composing the muscular, dissonant, unmistakably modern score for Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and the vast canvas of Cleopatra.

North wrote music of unusual intelligence and edge - the claustrophobic Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the anguished Death of a Salesman, the delicate The Rose Tattoo. He also composed Unchained Melody, almost as an afterthought for a forgotten 1955 prison picture, and watched it become one of the most recorded songs in history. Perhaps the most famous score he wrote was never heard: Kubrick commissioned him for 2001: A Space Odyssey, then discarded it for classical recordings without telling him, a wound North bore for years. Nominated for the Academy Award fifteen times, he never won a competitive Oscar, but in 1986 he became the first composer to receive an Honorary Academy Award for a lifetime of work. He died in Los Angeles in 1991.