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John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. With a career spanning over six decades, he has composed some of the most popular and recognizable film scores in cinematic history, including Jaws, the Star Wars series, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman: The Movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Indiana Jones series, the first two Home Alone films, the first two Jurassic Park films, Schindler's List, and the first three Harry Potter films. Williams has been associated with director Steven Spielberg since 1974, composing music for all but three of his feature films. Other notable works by Williams include theme music for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football, 'The Mission' theme used by NBC News, the television series Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, and the incidental music for the first season of Gilligan's Island. Williams has also composed numerous classical concertos and other works for orchestral ensembles and solo instruments. From 1980 to 1993, he served as the Boston Pops' principal conductor, and is now the orchestra's laureate conductor.
Williams has won 23 Grammy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, five Academy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. With 50 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most-nominated individual, after Walt Disney. In 2005, the American Film Institute selected Williams's score to 1977's Star Wars as the greatest American film score of all time. The soundtrack to Star Wars was additionally preserved by the Library of Congress into the National Recording Registry, for being 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant'. Williams was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl's Hall of Fame in 2000, and was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2016. Williams composed the score for eight of the top twenty highest-grossing films at the U.S. box office (adjusted for inflation).
Awards
John Williams has been nominated for 50 Academy Awards, winning 5; 6 Emmy Awards, winning 3; 25 Golden Globe Awards, winning 4; 67 Grammy Awards, winning 23; and has received 7 British Academy Film Awards. With 50 Oscar nominations, Williams currently holds the record for the most Oscar nominations for a living person, and is the second most nominated person in Academy Awards history behind Walt Disney's 59. Forty-five of Williams's Oscar nominations are for Best Original Score and five are for Best Original Song. He won four Oscars for Best Original Score and one for Best Scoring: Adaptation and Original Song Score (Fiddler on the Roof).
Williams has been inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. Williams was honored with the annual Richard Kirk award at the 1999 BMI Film and TV Awards, recognizing his contribution to film and television music. In 2004, he received Kennedy Center Honors. He won a Classic Brit Award in 2005 for his soundtrack work of the previous year.
Notably, Williams has won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition for his scores for Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, The Empire Strikes Back, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Angela's Ashes, Munich, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and The Book Thief. The competition includes not only composers of film scores, but also composers of instrumental music of any genre, including composers of classical fare such as symphonies and chamber music.
Williams received an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Boston College in 1993 and from Harvard University in 2017.
In 2003, the International Olympic Committee accorded Williams its highest individual honor, the Olympic Order.
In 2009, Williams received the National Medal of Arts in the White House in Washington, D.C. for his achievements in symphonic music for films, and 'as a pre-eminent composer and conductor [whose] scores have defined and inspired modern movie-going for decades.'
Williams was made an honorary brother of Kappa Kappa Psi at Boston University in the late 1980s. In 2013, Williams was presented with the Ken Burns Lifetime Achievement Award.
AFI
In 2005, the American Film Institute selected Williams's richly thematic and highly popular score to 1977's Star Wars as the greatest American film score of all time. His scores for Jaws and E.T. also appeared on the list, at No. 6 and No. 14, respectively. He is the only composer to have three scores on the list. Williams received the AFI Life Achievement Award in June 2016, becoming the first composer to receive the award.
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