James Newton Howard

James Newton Howard was born on June the 9th in Los Angeles. He began studying music as a small child and went on to attend USC School of Music and Santa Barbara's Music Academy of the West. He then majored at the University of Southern California, in piano performance.

After he left college, he toured for some time as a keyboardist with Elton John (late 1970s and early 1980s) and briefly toured with Crosby Stills and Nash. He moved on to film music in mid 1980 ties, he however collaborated briefly with Elton John in 1987 and conducted the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra where Elton performed his orchestrated songs.

Howard’s career skyrocketed in 1990 when he scored for the blockbuster romantic comedy ‘Pretty Woman’ and received his first Academy Award nomination in 1991 for his score for ‘The Prince of Tides’, Barbra Streisand's drama. Setting the musical mood for various movies for almost 2 decades now, he has tried his skills in a wide range of genres.

See James Newton Howard behind the curton of the scoring process to King Kong.

James Newton Howard received 4 more original score Oscar nominations, for action movie ‘The Fugitive’, romantic comedy ‘My Best Friend's Wedding’, M. Night Shyamalan's ‘The Village and Michael Clayton’. Also, Howard scored ‘Wyatt Earp’, the Western epic, Kevin Costner's ‘Waterworld’ and ‘Primal Fear’.

He collaborated on tunes for ‘One Fine Day’ and ‘Junior’ which earned him Best Song nominations and scored several smaller, character-oriented movies such as ‘Five Corners’, ‘Glengarry Glen Rose’ and ‘American Heart’. Apart from those, Howard showed himself as equally skilled at composing for big budget spectacles, such as ‘Space Jam’, ‘Dante's Peak’ (theme only) and ‘Collateral’.

In year 2000, he scored three Disney movies – ‘Dinosaur’, ‘Treasure Planet’ and ‘Atlantis: The Lost Empire’. He combined Arabic influences with western themes for ‘Hidalgo’ and dramatic and action accompaniment for Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong’, Interpreter and ‘Blood Diamond’. In a unique collaboration he co-wrote the action theme for ‘Batman Begins’ with Hans Zimmer, after several years of planning to work together. The result was lack of a heroic main theme and emphasis on percussion and electronic music, which owed more to Zimmer’s action film style, than Howard’s focusing on melody.

In 2007 James Howard has turned out seven film scores, including the futuristic action film “I am Legend’, then ‘The Lookout’, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War, ‘The Great Debaters’ and ‘The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep’. He has received his seventh Academy Award nomination for his ambient score for the thriller ‘Michael Clayton’, one of the best reviewed movies in 2007.

James Newton Howard has won many ASC, Authors and Publishers Awards. He was nominated for a Grammy nod for his haunting, dark score on ‘The Dark Knight’ movie, which was maybe his most poignant and memorable one of his career to this date. Howard also scored ‘Defiance’, Edward Zwick’s WW2 movie about the Holocaust. For that score he received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score – Motion Picture and the Academy Awards nomination, the eighth in his career.

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