Alex North (December 4, 1910 - September 8, 1991) was an American composer responsible for the first jazz-based film score (A Streetcar Named Desire). North was nominated for 15 Oscars, but did not win until receiving the lifetime achievement Academy Award in 1986. Among his many film scores are Spartacus, Cleopatra, Streetcar Named Desire, Death of A Salesman, Dragonslayer, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Viva Zapata.
Jerrald King "Jerry" Goldsmith (February 10, 1929 – July 21, 2004) was a famous and prolific American film score composer from Los Angeles, California. Goldsmith was nominated for eighteen Academy Awards (winning one, for The Omen), and also won five Emmy Awards. Goldsmith learned to play the piano at age six. At fourteen, he studied composition, theory and counterpoint with teachers Jacob Gimpel and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
Alfred Newman (March 17, 1900 – February 17, 1970), was a major American composer of music for films. In 1939, Newman began a twenty-one year career as music director for 20th Century-Fox Studios. He composed the familiar fanfare which accompanies the studio logo at the beginning of Fox's productions. At Fox, he also developed what came to be known as the Newman System, a means of synchronising the performance and recording of a musical score with the film. The system is still in use today.
Franz Waxman (December 24, 1906 – February 24, 1967) was a Jewish German American composer, known for his bravura Carmen Fantasie for violin and orchestra, based on musical themes from the Bizet opera Carmen, and for his musical scores for films. Waxman was born Franz Wachsmann in Königshütte (Chorzów) in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. He orchestrated Frederick Hollander's score for the 1930 film Blue Angel (1930) and wrote original scores for several German films in the early 1930s.
Max Steiner was an Austrian composer who achieved legendary status as the creator of hundreds of classic American film scores. As a child he was astonishingly musically gifted, composing complex works as a teenager and completing the course of study at Vienna's Hochschule fuer Musik und Darstellende Kunst in only one year, at the age of sixteen. He studied under Gustav Mahler and, before the age of twenty, made his living as a conductor and as composer of works for the theater, the concert hall, and vaudeville.