Miklos Rozsa
18 April 1907 - 27 July 1995
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
One of the all-time great film composers, Rozsa has a résumé that reads like a checklist of Hollywood classics. His career began in Leipzig in the 1930s; from there he studied in Paris and went on to London to work with Alexander Korda. The two collaborated on The Thief of Bagdad (1940), which brought the composer to Hollywood and earned him an Academy Award nomination, the first of many. (Among the others: 1941's Lydia and Sundown 1942's Jungle Book 1943's The Woman of the Town 1945's A Song to Remember 1946's The Killers 1951's Quo Vadis? 1952's Ivanhoe and 1953's Julius Caesar) Rozsa stayed on to begin a career that spanned four decades. His scores were noted for full-bodied orchestrations in the European Romantic tradition; as a result, he was much in demand both for small, intense melodramas such as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945), both of which rated Oscar nominations, and for epics such as King of Kings and El Cid (both 1961, the latter an Oscar nominee for Best Score and Song). In fact, he scored nearly every single type of film there is. Rozsa won three Academy Awards for best original score: Spellbound (1945, which made pioneering use of the theremin, an electronic instrument), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959). Less active in the 1980s; his last full score was written for Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982).