Dimitri Tiomkin

Born in the Ukrainian town of Kremenchuk in the Russian Empire, Dimitri Tiomkin trained as a concert pianist at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and fled the Russian Revolution, playing in Berlin cafes and Paris music halls before reaching America in the 1920s. He gave the European premiere of Gershwin's Concerto in F and toured as a virtuoso until the Depression and a wrist injury pushed him toward Hollywood.

There the exuberant Russian with the thick accent - he liked to joke about scoring pictures set in an America he had learned from the movies - became one of its most successful composers, and a canny self-promoter who understood the business as few artists did. Frank Capra gave him his first major films, and Tiomkin repaid him with the warm, populist scores of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Lost Horizon, and It's a Wonderful Life. But it was the Western that made him immortal.

His score for High Noon in 1952 changed the industry: rather than lush underscore, he built the film around a single ballad, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin', and won two Academy Awards in one night, for score and song. The gambit made the movie theme song a commercial force, and Tiomkin exploited it brilliantly across Giant, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Rio Bravo, and the television theme for Rawhide. He won two further Oscars, for The High and the Mighty and The Old Man and the Sea, and delivered a famously cheeky acceptance speech thanking Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss. He worked into the 1960s on epics like The Alamo and 55 Days at Peking, then retired to Europe. He died in London in 1979, having given the mythic American landscape a musical grandeur invented, improbably, by a man from the Ukrainian steppe.