Elmer Bernstein

Born on New York's Upper West Side to immigrant parents, Elmer Bernstein - no relation to Leonard, a coincidence he spent a lifetime clarifying - was a gifted child pianist who studied dance, acting, and painting before settling on music, with early encouragement from the composer Aaron Copland. After Army service scoring broadcasts during the war, he headed to Hollywood, only to see his fledgling career nearly derailed when the blacklist era's suspicions pushed him into low-budget films.

He clawed back with two landmark scores in the mid-1950s. For Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955 he wrote a hard-driving jazz score for its portrait of heroin addiction - startling, urban, and hugely influential - and for Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments he composed music of vast Biblical grandeur, proving he could command any scale. Then came the score that made him a legend: the galloping, brass-and-strings main theme of The Magnificent Seven in 1960, so quintessentially American that it came to stand for the Western itself and, later, for a famous cigarette campaign.

Bernstein's range was immense. He gave The Great Escape its jaunty march, To Kill a Mockingbird a score of hushed, childlike wonder widely counted among the finest ever written, and lent his gifts to everything from the epic Hawaii to the comedies of a later generation - Animal House, Airplane!, Ghostbusters, Trading Places - introducing his sound to audiences who never knew his name. Nominated fourteen times, he won a single competitive Oscar, for the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967. Working into his eighties, he enjoyed a late renaissance with Martin Scorsese and others, and completed the score for Far from Heaven shortly before his death in Ojai, California, in 2004, a bridge between the Golden Age he came up in and the modern film music he helped inspire.