Hugo Friedhofer

Born in San Francisco to a family of musicians - his father was a cellist - Hugo Friedhofer played cello himself in theater and silent-movie pit orchestras, teaching himself orchestration by devouring scores. When sound came he moved to Los Angeles and became, for more than a decade, the indispensable man behind the men whose names went on the screen: as a principal orchestrator at Warner Bros. he clothed the melodies of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner in their glowing symphonic colors, orchestrating dozens of the studio's most celebrated scores, from Captain Blood to The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Colleagues regarded him as the finest orchestrator in the business, a musician of deep learning and dry wit, but he longed to compose in his own voice. When he finally got his chance he seized it. His score for The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, William Wyler's drama of soldiers returning from war, was a model of restraint and Americana - spare, unsentimental, and deeply moving - and it won him the Academy Award, a rare triumph for a former orchestrator.

He never became a household name, working steadily but without fanfare across the next two decades on films such as The Bishop's Wife, Broken Arrow (whose music drew thoughtfully on Native American themes), Ace in the Hole, An Affair to Remember, and Vera Cruz, earning nine Oscar nominations in all. A fastidious craftsman, he was admired within the profession as a composer's composer, and younger musicians sought his counsel. Modest and self-deprecating about his own gifts, he continued arranging and orchestrating for others even as fashions changed, and he mentored a generation of film composers. He died in Los Angeles in 1981, honored by those who knew the craft as one of the true masters of the studio orchestra.