James Horner

Biography

James Roy Horner (August 14, 1953 – June 22, 2015) was an American composer. He worked on over 160 film and television productions between 1978 and 2015, and was the winner of two Academy Awards, among many other accolades. He was known for the integration of choral and electronic elements alongside traditional orchestrations, and for his use of motifs associated with Celtic music.

Horner won two Academy Awards for James Cameron's Titanic (1997), for which he composed 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 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). Horner's other notable scores include Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982),[6] Willow (1988), The Land Before Time (1988), Glory (1989), The Rocketeer (1991), Legends of the Fall (1994), The Mask of Zorro (1998), Troy (2004), and The New World (2005).

Horner collaborated on multiple projects with directors including Don Bluth, James Cameron, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Joe Johnston, Walter Hill, Mel Gibson, Vadim Perelman, Ron Howard, Edward Zwick, Nicholas Meyer, Wolfgang Petersen, Martin Campbell, Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells; producers including George Lucas, David Kirschner, Lawrence Gordon, Jon Landau, Brian Grazer and Steven Spielberg; and songwriters including Will Jennings, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. He won two Academy Awards; Best Original Score for Titanic and Best Original Song for "My Heart Will Go On", 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. The scores for his final three films, Southpaw (2015), The 33 (2015), and The Magnificent Seven (2016), were all completed and released posthumously.