John Hollingsworth

Hollingsworth studied at the Guildhall School of Music, and, by 1939, was conducting concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra. The following year, he joined the orchestra of the Royal Air Force as an associate conductor, at the same time orchestrating wartime documentaries made by the Crown Film Unit. After the war, Hollingsworth alternated working on feature films with conducting for ballet and classical music, frequently performing at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 1945, he joined Cineguild to work under Muir Mathieson as assistant musical director, notably involved in the Sergei Rachmaninoff score (the hugely popular Second Piano Concerto) for Brief Encounter (1945). In 1954, he replaced Frank Spencer as musical director at Hammer Studios. As music supervisor, he worked on some of Hammer's best-known films, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)and Horror of Dracula (1958). He also occasionally free-lanced for other studios, involved in such notable films as The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963), the Peter Sellers comedy Heavens Above! (1963) and Joseph Losey's The Damned (1962). Hollingsworth remained in his position at Hammer until his untimely death in 1963, aged just 47, of pneumonia.