John Williams
John Towner Williams (born
February 8, 1932) is an American composer and conductor. Over his seven-decade career, he has composed many of the best known scores in film history. His style blends romanticism, impressionism and atonal music with complex orchestration. Best known for his collaborations with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, he has received numerous accolades, including 27 Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, seven BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards. With a total of 54 Academy Award nominations, he is the second-most nominated person in the award's history, after Walt Disney. He is also the oldest Academy Award nominee in any category, receiving a nomination at 91 years old.
Williams's early work as a film composer includes None but the Brave (1965), Valley of the Dolls (1967), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), Images (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974). His work with Spielberg began on The Sugarland Express (1974), and he has composed music for all but five of his feature films. He received Academy Awards for Fiddler on the Roof (1971; arrangement of the original score by Jerry Bock), Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Schindler's List (1993). Other memorable collaborations with Spielberg include Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), Lincoln (2012) and The Fabelmans (2022). He also scored Superman (1978), the first two Home Alone films (1990–1992), and the first three Harry Potter films (2001–2004).
Williams served as the Boston Pops' principal conductor from 1980 to 1993 and is its laureate conductor. He has also composed numerous classical concertos and other works for orchestral ensembles and solo instruments. Williams's works include theme music for the 1984 Summer Olympics, "The Mission" theme (used by NBC News and Seven News in Australia) and PBS's Great Performances.
Williams received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2004, the National Medal of the Arts in 2009 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2016. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1998, the Hollywood Bowl's Hall of Fame in 2000 and the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2004. In 2022, Williams was awarded an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, "for services to film music". The Library of Congress included the Star Wars score in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The American Film Institute included three of his scores on its AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores: Jaws, E.T. and, in first place, Star Wars. His career is chronicled in Music by John Williams (2024).
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