Horner brought wonder, magic to movie music
James Horner might not have gotten top billing for his film work, but his name in the credits meant something: wonder, mystery, magic.
Horner, 61, who died Monday when his two-seater plane crashed near Santa Barbara, Calif., was one of Hollywood's best known composers, writing the scores for more than 100 films, including Titanic and Avatar, two of the most popular ever made.
The Oscar-winning composer specialized in sweeping, orchestral scores that conveyed the yearning and the awe of the film experience. His music lent itself to tales told on a grand scale, like Braveheart and Glory, and to stories of speculation and fantasy, from Field of Dreams and Cocoon to Aliens and The Rocketeer.
Horner was born in Los Angeles in 1953, studying at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. He got early scoring work with director Roger Corman and landed his first major feature film in 1979, The Lady in Red.
He moved into the big leagues when he was hired to write the score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, stepping into the shoes of the great Jerry Goldsmith, who had scored the film Star Trek film. He moved from there to 48 Hours, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and others.
He received his first Academy Award nominations in 1987, for best original score (Aliens) and best original song, having written the Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram smash Somewhere Out There with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill for the animated An American Tail.
Horner received eight more Oscar nominations during his career, winning two in 1997 for his work on Titanic, best original dramatic score and best original song for the Celine Dion hit My Heart Will Go On, which he wrote with lyricist Will Jennings.
His scores for Field of Dreams, Apollo 13, Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, House of Sand and Fog and Avatar also received Oscar nominations.
He won six Grammys, including song of the year for Somewhere Out There in 1988 and again in 1999 for My Heart Will Go On. His score for the Civil War film Glory was named best instrumental composition written for film or television in 1991.
The composer's upcoming projects include Jake Gyllenhaal's boxing drama Southpaw (in theaters July 24) and The 33 (Nov. 13) based on the 2010 mining disaster in Chile. He would have begun work on the Avatar sequels later this year.
Known as an avid aviator, Horner scored the 2015 National Geographic IMAX documentary Living in the Age of Airplanes, narrated by Harrison Ford, who survived a single-engine plane crash in March.
According to Horner's attorney, Jay Cooper, Horner was an experienced pilot who owned three planes and two helicopters. One of those planes was the S-312 Tucano MK1 turbo-prop two-seater he was piloting when he died.
As his assistant, Sylvia Patrycja, said in her Facebook post confirming Horner's death, "He died doing what he loved."