Max Steiner

Born in Vienna into a theatrical dynasty - his grandfather managed the Theater an der Wien - Maximilian Raoul Steiner was a musical wunderkind who reportedly finished a full course of study at the Imperial Academy in a single year and had an operetta staged before he was out of his teens. A godson of Richard Strauss and a student in the orbit of Gustav Mahler, he conducted across Europe before the First World War stranded him in London and then carried him to New York, where he spent the 1920s orchestrating and conducting Broadway shows.

When sound arrived, RKO brought him west, and Steiner discovered his true vocation: convincing a skeptical industry that continuous background music would not make audiences wonder where the orchestra was hiding. His breakthrough came in 1933 with King Kong, a wall-to-wall symphonic score so vivid it became a character in its own right and effectively established the template for everything that followed. He won the first of his three Academy Awards for The Informer, and went on to score, among hundreds of films, Gone with the Wind - whose sweeping Tara's Theme is among the most recognized melodies ever written for the screen - as well as Casablanca, Now Voyager, Since You Went Away, Dark Victory, and Mildred Pierce.

His method leaned on the leitmotif, recurring themes tied to characters and ideas, and on the tight synchronizing of music to on-screen action that critics both praised and parodied. Astonishingly prolific, he anchored the music departments at RKO and then Warner Bros., often writing hours of music in mere weeks. By the 1950s his lush late-Romantic idiom was falling out of fashion, and failing eyesight slowed him; he scored his last film in 1965. He died in Los Angeles in 1971, remembered, with justice, as the father of film music.