John Williams

Biography

John Towner Williams KBE (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career that has spanned seven decades, he has composed some of the most popular, recognizable, and critically acclaimed film scores in cinema history.

Williams has won 25 Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. With 53 Academy Award nominations, he is the second most-nominated individual, after Walt Disney.

His compositions are considered the epitome of film music, and he is considered among the greatest composers in the history of cinema.

Williams has composed many of his film-scoring works for frequent collaborators Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and other directors such as Chris Columbus, Oliver Stone, Richard Donner, Irwin Kershner, Sydney Pollack, Alfred Hitchcock, Mark Rydell, Mark Robson, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Robert Altman.

Williams has been associated with director Steven Spielberg since 1974, composing music for all but five of his feature films, and George Lucas, with whom he has worked on both of his main franchises.

His early work as a film composer includes The Killers (1964), How to Steal a Million (1966), Valley of the Dolls (1967), and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969).

He has received five Academy Awards for Best Original Score for his work on Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Jaws (1975), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Star Wars (1977), and Schindler's List (1993). Williams has composed many popular films including the Star Wars saga, Superman, the first two Home Alone films, the Indiana Jones films, the first two Jurassic Park films, and the first three Harry Potter films.

Other memorable film scores from his collaboration with Spielberg include Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Hook (1991), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), and The Fabelmans (2022).

Williams has also composed numerous classical concertos and other works for orchestral ensembles and solo instruments. He served as the Boston Pops' principal conductor from 1980 to 1993 and is its laureate conductor.

Other works by Williams include theme music for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football, "The Mission" theme used by NBC News and Seven News in Australia, the television series Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, and the incidental music for the first season of Gilligan's Island.

Williams announced but then rescinded his intention to retire from film score composing after the release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023.

In 2005, the American Film Institute selected Williams's score for 1977's Star Wars as the greatest film score of all time. The Library of Congress entered the Star Wars soundtrack into the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Williams was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl's Hall of Fame in 2000, and he received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2004. His AFI Life Achievement Award in 2016 was the first to be awarded outside of the acting and directing fields.

He has composed the score for nine of the top 25 highest-grossing films at the U.S. box office (adjusted for inflation). His work has influenced other composers of film, and popular, and contemporary classical music.