Miklós Rózsa

Born in Budapest to a well-to-do family, Miklos Rozsa absorbed Hungarian folk music from the peasants on his father's country estate and trained rigorously in Leipzig, launching a respected European concert career before he was thirty. Drawn into film through the Hungarian-born producer Alexander Korda in London, he followed Korda's production of The Thief of Bagdad to Hollywood in 1940 and stayed for the rest of his life.

Rozsa possessed a rare double gift, and he insisted on exercising both halves of it - writing symphonies, concertos, and chamber works for the concert platform while scoring films for the studios, a double life he made the title of his autobiography. In the 1940s he practically defined the sound of psychological tension: his brooding, dissonant, theremin-tinged scores for Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and Spellbound became the sonic vocabulary of noir and neurosis, winning him the Academy Award for Spellbound and again for A Double Life.

In the 1950s MGM turned him to antiquity, and Rozsa reinvented himself once more, researching ancient Greek and Roman modes to lend authenticity to a run of grand historical epics - Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, Julius Caesar, El Cid, King of Kings. The summit was Ben-Hur in 1959, a monumental score of more than three hours that won his third Oscar and stands as one of the most influential epic scores ever written. He continued composing concert works throughout, and late in life enjoyed a lovely coda when younger directors revived his noir manner. He died in Los Angeles in 1995, one of the few film composers to earn genuine, lasting respect on both sides of a divide that Hollywood had long treated as unbridgeable.