Franz Waxman

Born Franz Wachsmann in Konigshutte, in Upper Silesia, he defied a father who wanted him in banking, working as a bank teller by day while studying music at night. In Weimar Berlin he arranged for jazz bands and orchestrated Friedrich Hollaender's score for The Blue Angel, launching a film career that a Nazi-era beating on a Berlin street abruptly ended; he fled, via Paris, to Hollywood in 1934.

At Universal he made an immediate mark with Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, whose jagged, feverish music helped define the sound of horror. Moving to MGM and then Warner Bros., he proved endlessly versatile, scoring Captains Courageous, Rebecca and Suspicion for Hitchcock, and the sardonic, unforgettable music for Sunset Boulevard. He achieved something no composer had done before: winning the Academy Award two years running, for Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun, the latter's smoky, saxophone-laced score a landmark in dramatic film music.

His range was extraordinary - the swashbuckling Prince Valiant, the shimmering Rear Window, the tender Peyton Place, and the show-stopping Carmen Fantasie, a concert violin piece drawn from his score for Humoresque that became a virtuoso staple. Deeply serious about music beyond the studio, in 1947 he founded the Los Angeles Music Festival, which he conducted for two decades, championing new works and premiering pieces by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others. Late in his career he turned to weightier statements, including the song cycle The Song of Terezin, memorializing the children of the Holocaust. He died of cancer in Los Angeles in 1967, at sixty, respected as one of the most sophisticated and adventurous musicians the studio system ever employed.