James Horner

He emigrated to the United States in 1935 and worked as a set designer and art director.

His mother, Joan Ruth (née Frankel), was born to a Canadian family.

His brother Christopher is a writer and documentary filmmaker.

Horner started playing piano at the age of five.

He also played violin.

He spent his early years in London, where he attended the Royal College of Music, where he studied with György Ligeti.

He returned to America, where he attended Verde Valley School in Sedona, Arizona, and later received his bachelor's degree in music from the University of Southern California.

After earning a master's degree, he started work on his doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he studied with Paul Chihara, among others.

James Roy Horner (August 14, 1953 – June 22, 2015) was an American film composer.

Horner was born on August 14, 1953, in Los Angeles, California, to Jewish immigrant parents.

His father, Harry Horner, was born in Holice, Bohemia, then a part of Austria-Hungary.

After several scoring assignments with the American Film Institute in the 1970s, he finished teaching a course in music theory at UCLA, then turned to film scoring.

Horner was also an avid pilot and owned several small airplanes.

His studio was filled with small automatons and objects which he purchased and collected over time.

In a documentary produced after his death, Horner's wife Sara stated that he described himself as having Asperger syndrome; according to Sara "He would say himself, and did at the end of his life, that he had Asperger's, and he definitely had a different kind of neurological wiring."

Horner's first credits as a feature-film composer were for B-movie director and producer Roger Corman.

At the 70th Academy Awards, Horner received the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score, and shared the Oscar for Best Original Song with co-writer Will Jennings for "My Heart Will Go On".

He worked on over 160 film and television productions between 1978 and 2015.

He was known for the integration of choral and electronic elements alongside traditional orchestrations, and for his use of motifs associated with Celtic music.

1979's The Lady in Red, was followed by 1980's Humanoids from the Deep and Battle Beyond the Stars.

As his work gained notice in Hollywood, Horner was invited to take on larger projects.

Horner continued writing high-profile film scores in the 1980s, including 48 Hrs. (1982), Krull (1983), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Commando (1985), Cocoon (1985), Aliens (1986), Captain EO (1986), *batteries not included (1987), Willow (1988), Glory and Field of Dreams (both 1989).

Cocoon was the first of his many collaborations with director Ron Howard.

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Horner wrote orchestral scores for family films (particularly those produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment), with credits for An American Tail (1986); The Land Before Time (1988); The Rocketeer, Once Around and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991); Once Upon a Forest and We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993); The Pagemaster (1994); Casper, Jumanji and Balto (1995); Mighty Joe Young (1998); and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000).

Horner's other notable scores include Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Willow (1988), The Land Before Time (1988), Glory (1989), The Rocketeer (1991), Legends of the Fall (1994), Jumanji (1995), The Mask of Zorro (1998), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), Troy (2004), The New World (2005), Apocalypto (2006), The Karate Kid (2010), and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).

Horner collaborated on multiple projects with directors including James Cameron, Don Bluth, Ron Howard, Joe Johnston, Edward Zwick, Walter Hill, Mel Gibson, Vadim Perelman, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Nicholas Meyer, Wolfgang Petersen, Martin Campbell, Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells; producers including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, David Kirschner, Brian Grazer, Jon Landau, and Lawrence Gordon; and songwriters including Will Jennings, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

Adding to his two Academy Awards win, Horner also won six Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, and was nominated for three BAFTA Awards.

Horner, who was an avid pilot, was killed in a single-fatality crash while flying his Short Tucano turboprop aircraft.

He was 61 years old.

Horner's big break came in 1982 when he was asked to score Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

It established him as an A-list Hollywood composer.

Director Nicholas Meyer quipped that Horner was hired because the studio could no longer afford the first Trek movie's composer, Jerry Goldsmith; but that by the time Meyer returned to the franchise with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the studio could not afford Horner either.

Horner's other Oscar-nominated scores were for Aliens (1986), An American Tail (1986), Field of Dreams (1989), Apollo 13 (1995), Braveheart (1995), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and House of Sand and Fog (2003).

In 1987, Horner's original score for Aliens brought him his first Academy Award nomination.

"Somewhere Out There," which he co-composed and co-wrote with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for An American Tail, was also nominated that year for Best Original Song.

Horner scored six films in 1995, including his commercially successful and critically acclaimed works for Braveheart and Apollo 13, both of which received Academy Award nominations.

Horner won two Academy Awards for James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which became the best-selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time.

He also wrote the score for the highest-grossing film of all time, Cameron's Avatar.

Horner's biggest critical and financial success came in 1997 with his score for James Cameron's Titanic.

The scores for his final three films, Southpaw (2015), The 33 (2015) and The Magnificent Seven (2016), were all completed and released posthumously.