David Raksin

Born in Philadelphia, the son of a musician who conducted for silent movies, David Raksin grew up steeped in both the classical repertoire and the popular song, playing clarinet and saxophone in dance bands and arranging on Tin Pan Alley as a teenager. Hollywood brought him west in 1935 for an unlikely first assignment: adapting and arranging Charlie Chaplin's melodies for Modern Times, a collaboration that taught the brash young musician how a film's music could shape its feeling.

His moment came in 1944 with Laura. Otto Preminger wanted to use an existing pop song for the murdered woman's theme; Raksin argued for something new and, over a single weekend - spurred, the story goes, by a farewell note from his wife - wrote a melody of aching, unresolved yearning that became the film's obsessive heart. Laura went on to become one of the most recorded songs of the century, second, it was often said, only to Stardust. It made his name, though he always noted wryly that the tune overshadowed the rest of his work.

That work was substantial and sophisticated: the acid, brilliant score for The Bad and the Beautiful, the lush Forever Amber, the tender Carrie, and dozens more, marked by harmonic daring and real symphonic craftsmanship. He was among the first composers to take film music seriously as an art to be studied, teaching for decades at the University of Southern California and UCLA, writing and lecturing with wit and erudition, and mentoring younger composers who came to call him the grandfather of film music. Outspoken and generous, he served as president of the Composers and Lyricists Guild and fought for creators' rights. He kept teaching almost to the end, dying in Los Angeles in 2004 at ninety-one, his most famous four bars still drifting through the culture.