John Williams

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John Towner Williams (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 person, after Walt Disney. His compositions are often considered the epitome of orchestral film music and he is considered among the greatest composers in the history of cinema. Williams is known for his collaborations with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and has worked with such diverse directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, Chris Columbus, Oliver Stone, Richard Donner, Irvin Kershner, Sydney Pollack, Mark Rydell, Mark Robson, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and J. J. Abrams. He has a very distinct sound that mixes romanticism, impressionism and atonal music with complex orchestration.

His early work as a film composer includes ''The Killers'' (1964), ''How to Steal a Million'' (1966), ''Valley of the Dolls'' (1967), ''Goodbye, Mr. Chips'' (1969) and Altman's ''Images'' (1972) and ''The Long Goodbye'' (1973). Williams has been associated with Spielberg since his 1974 film ''The Sugarland Express'', composing music for all but five of his feature films. Spielberg recommended him to Lucas, who hired him to score ''Star Wars''. His first Academy Award was for Best Scoring: Adaptation and Original Song Score for ''Fiddler on the Roof'' (1971). Four more Academy Awards, for Best Original Score, followed, for his work on ''Jaws'' (1975), ''Star Wars'' (1977), ''E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial'' (1982), and ''Schindler's List'' (1993). Other memorable film scores from his collaboration with Spielberg include ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' (1977), ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' (1981), ''Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'' (1984), ''Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade'' (1989), ''Hook'' (1991), ''Jurassic Park'' (1993), ''Saving Private Ryan'' (1998), ''A.I. Artificial Intelligence'' (2001), ''Catch Me If You Can'' (2002), ''War of the Worlds'' (2005), ''War Horse'' (2011), ''Lincoln'' (2012), and ''The Fabelmans'' (2022). Williams also scored ''Superman'' (1978), the first two ''Home Alone'' films and the first three ''Harry Potter'' films.

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 to 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, popular, and contemporary classical music. Marcus Paus argues that Williams' "satisfying way of embodying dissonance and avant-garde techniques within a larger tonal framework" makes him "one of the great composers of any century".