John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer and conductor. In a career that spans six decades, Williams has composed many of the most famous film scores in history, including those for Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Hook and Harry Potter. In addition, he has composed theme music for four Olympic Games, numerous television series and concert pieces. He served as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993, and is now the orchestra's laureate conductor.
Williams is a five-time winner of the Academy Award, and his 45 nominations to date make him joint second-most nominated individual with fellow composer Alfred Newman (only Walt Disney had more). He was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.
John Williams was born on February 8, 1932 in Long Island, New York, USA. In 1948, he moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he attended North Hollywood High School. He later attended the University of California, Los Angeles and Los Angeles City College, and studied privately with composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. In 1952, Williams was drafted into the United States Air Force, where he conducted and arranged music for the Air Force Band as part of his duties.
After his service ended in 1954, Williams returned to New York City and entered Juilliard School, where he studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne. During this time he also worked as a jazz pianist at New York's many studios and clubs. He had played with composer Henry Mancini, and performed on the recording of the Peter Gunn theme. He was known as "Johnny" Williams in the early 1960s, and served as arranger and bandleader on a series of popular albums with singer Frankie Laine.
Williams was married to actress Barbara Ruick from 1956 until her death on March 3, 1974. They had three children together. One of those children is Joseph Williams, former lead singer for the band Toto. He married for a second time on June 9, 1980 to his current wife, Samantha Winslow. Williams is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi, the national honorary fraternity for college band members.
After his studies at Juilliard, Williams returned to Los Angeles and began working as an orchestrator in film studios. Among others, he had worked with composers Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman. He was also a studio pianist, performing in scores by composers such as Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein. Williams began to compose scores for television series in the late 1950s, eventually leading to Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel.
Williams's first major film composition was for the B-movie Daddy-O in 1958, and his first screen credit came two years later in Because They're Young. He soon gained notice in Hollywood for his versatility in composing jazz, piano and symphonic music. He received his first Academy Award nomination for his score to the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, and was nominated again in 1969 for Goodbye, Mr. Chips. He won his first Academy Award for his adapted score to the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof. By the early 1970s, Williams had established himself as a composer for large-scale disaster films, with scores for The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno (the last two films, scored in 1974, borrowing musical cues from each other).
In 1974, Williams was approached by Steven Spielberg to write the music for his feature directoral debut, The Sugarland Express. The young director was impressed by Williams's score to the 1969 film The Reivers, and was convinced the composer could provide the sound he desired for his films. They re-teamed a year later for the director's second film, Jaws. Widely considered a classic suspense piece, the score's ominous two-note motif has become nearly synonymous with sharks and approaching danger. The score earned Williams a second Academy Award, his first for an original composition.
Shortly afterwards, Williams and Spielberg began preparing for their next feature film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Unusual for a Hollywood production, Spielberg's script and Williams's musical concepts were developed at the same time and were closely linked. During the two-year creative collaboration, they settled on a distinctive five-note motif that functioned both as background music and the communication signal of the film's alien mothership. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in 1977.
In the same period, Spielberg recommended Williams to his friend and fellow director George Lucas, who needed a composer to score his ambitious space epic, Star Wars. Williams produced a grand symphonic score in the fashion of Richard Strauss and Golden Age Hollywood composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner. Its main theme is among the most widely-recognized in motion picture history, and the Force Theme and Princess Leia's Theme are also well-known examples of leitmotif. The film and its soundtrack were both immensely successful, and Williams won another Academy Award for Best Original Score. In 1980, Williams returned to score The Empire Strikes Back, where he famously introduces The Imperial March as the theme for Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire. The original Star Wars trilogy concluded with the 1983 film Return of the Jedi, for which Williams's score provides the Emperor's Theme.
Williams worked with director Richard Donner to score the 1978 film Superman. The score's heroic and romantic themes, particularly the main march, the Superman fanfare and the love theme (known as "Can You Read My Mind"), would appear in the four subsequent sequel films.
For the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, Williams wrote a rousing main theme known as The Raiders' March to accompany the film's hero, Indiana Jones. He also composed separate themes to represent the Ark of the Covenant, the character Marion and the Nazi villains of the story. Additional themes were featured in his scores to the sequel films Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Williams composed an emotional and sensitive score to Spielberg's 1982 fantasy film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The music conveys the film's benign, child-like sense of innocence, particularly with a spirited theme for the freedom of flight, and a soft string-based theme for the friendship between characters E.T. and Elliott. The film's final chase and farewell sequence marks a rare instance in film history, in which the on-screen action is edited to conform to the composer's musical interpretation. Williams was awarded a fourth Academy Award for this score.
The 1985 film The Color Purple is the only feature film directed by Steven Spielberg for which John Williams did not serve as composer. The film's producer, Quincy Jones, wanted to personally arrange and compose the music for the project. Williams also did not score Twilight Zone: The Movie, but Spielberg had directed only one of the four segments in that film. The film's music was written by another veteran Hollywood composer, Jerry Goldsmith. The Williams-Spielberg collaboration resumed with the director's 1987 film Empire of the Sun.
While skilled in a variety of twentieth-century compositional idioms, his most familiar style may be described as a form of neoromanticism, inspired by the large-scale orchestral music of the late 19th century, especially Wagnerian music and leitmotif, and that of Williams's film-composing predecessors. He was inducted to the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.
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