John Addison

British composer, primarily of film scores. From a military family and the son of a Royal Field Artillery colonel, John Mervyn Addison was born March 16, 1920, in Chobham, Surrey, and attended Wellington College, Berkshire, with plans for a military career. His interest and talent for music intervened, and he left Wellington for the Royal College of Music. With the opening of the Second World War, however, he was diverted back to the military and spent the war in a tank unit of the 22nd Hussars, being wounded in Normandy and rising to the rank of captain. After the war, he returned to the Royal College of Music, specializing in composition, clarinet, and oboe. By age 30, he had been made a professor of composition. He had previously won the RCM's Sullivan Award for Composition and was soon deluged with commissions for new compositions. He produced a wide variety of concerti, chamber pieces, and ballets. Although his first music for a film came in 1942 for Roy Boulting's Thunder Rock, his score was not used, and it was 1950 before he truly entered his principal profession, that of film composer. He scored numerous prominent films, among them Seven Days to Noon, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, and Tom Jones, for which he won an Academy Award. He received another Oscar nomination for his score to Sleuth, and a BAFTA nomination for his music for A Bridge Too Far, coincidentally the story of a World War II battle in which he himself had participated. In the late 1970s, Addison moved to the United States and focused a good deal of his work on television productions, most famously creating the popular theme music to the TV series Murder She Wrote. He died following a stroke, on December 7, 1998, in Bennington, Vermont. He was survived by his wife Pamela, 2 stepchildren, and 3 of his four biological children.