My final film composer for now is possibly my favourite of the ones I’ve featured so far.
It’s the late James Horner.
Scoring over 100 films during his career, Horner, like John Williams in my previous post has made a substantial contribution to the world of modern cinema.
Winning multiple awards and scoring a number of award winning movies, he sprung to fame in the early 80s after composing the score to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) which established him as an A-List Hollywood composer.
Over the next four decades he would go on to write music for some of the biggest films of our time.
His most notable works include: Cocoon (1985), Aliens (1986), Braveheart (1995), Jumanji (1995), Titanic (1997), A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Avatar (2009).
Once again like many composers James Horner frequently collaborated with some of the same directors, notably James Cameron, Ron Howard and Mel Gibson.
His score for Titanic (1997) is the best-selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time.
It’s similar in some ways to his music in Braveheart two years previous due to the use of Celtic themes. Personally though I think Braveheart is the better soundtrack, but I guess Titanic was such a big hit with audiences that people fell in love with the music too.
Sadly James Horner died in 2015 when the aircraft he was piloting crashed into the Los Padres National Forest near California.
It's such a sad loss of a great talent but thankfully he left behind some wonderful music.
This is one of my favourite pieces of his music from the opening credits of The Grinch (2000).