| John
Towner Williams * February 8, 1932 (New York) Father: Johnny Williams (Jazz Drummer) Mother: Esther Williams Brothers: Jerry, Don Sister: Joan First Wife (married in 1956): Barbara Ruick (died 1974) Second Wife (married in 1980): Samantha Winslow Sons: Joseph, Mark Instruments: Piano, Trombone, Trumpet, Clarinet |
Contact:
John Williams Agency: John Williams |
|
|
|
|
| John Williams and his Family |
|
|
| John Williams and the Boston Pops |
|
|
| John Williams' Long-Time Collaborators |
|
|
John Williams
received the
AFI Life Achievement Award
in June 2016
John Williams
at Kennedy Center where he was honored for his
lifelong contribution to American culture.
(Dec 12, 2004)
|
John Williams receives an Academy Award for STAR WARS (1977). 5 Academy Awards 1. Fiddler on the
Roof (1971) John Williams is the second most-nominated person after Walt Disney. 54 Academy Award Nominations INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (2023) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) THE FABELMANS (2022) -– Nominee, Music (Original Score) STAR WARS - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019) -– Nominee, Music (Original Score) STAR WARS - THE LAST JEDI (2017) -– Nominee, Music (Original Score) STAR WARS - THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) THE BOOK THIEF (2013) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) LINCOLN (2012) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) WAR HORSE (2011) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN (2011) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) MUNICH (2005) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA (2005) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (2004) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE (2001) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) THE PATRIOT (2000) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) ANGELA'S ASHES
(1999) -- Nominee, Music (Original Score) 4 Golden
Globes **** 22 Grammy Awards 1. Jaws (1975) (Best
Album of Original Score Written for a Motion Picture) Honorary Degrees
|
Quotes:
|
|
On Conducting
"My greatest joy is always the first day of the recording session. All of the brain busting, back-straining labor of writing the music is behind one and all of the difficulties of dubbing and assimilation of the score to the soundtrack has yet to happen and is ahead of you. There's a moment of exhilaration and pure pleasure in just performing the music and hearing the orchestra play it. That's the high point I think for most composers." |
|
|
|
| On Success
"We can't anticipate success in the things that we do. You may write a sentence that will become chiseled in marble on someone's library, but you don't know that when you write it. And that's usually not the best motivation behind that kind of creative activity anyway. I think if it's fantastic and fun and adventurous, that gives us our best time, and very often will give us our best result also. These films, and the STAR WARS films, all of us working on those just regard them as something that would be fun for kids to see on Saturday morning and none of us, including George Lucas himself, ever had any anticipation that they would become as successful as they have become. I think that's after the fact, and if any of us could predict what ingredients or what series of mental attitudes could be strung together to create that kind of success, if we could do it on order, we'd all be multi-billionaires. But you can't. It's more elusive and more subtle, and as a consequence more interesting and even more fun." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
On Steven Spielberg
"He is always close at hand, in a very positive way, musically: He's extremely fond of music. His greatest pleasure, he tells me ... and I believe him ... is the time when he can come sit on the stage and listen to the orchestra play as we accompany his film. In the weeks that precede that, when I'm writing, he likes to come into my office and hear me playing what I'm doing on the piano. He'll sit and always enjoy it, and he's very helpful, particularly in areas of rhythm. When I'm looking at a film on a moviola I'll be plotting out tempos and rhythmic approaches and he's very sensitive to whether this is faster than that ... or that is slower than this. He's a very good musician in his natural impulses, and always contributes in an interested and very wholesome way. It's wonderful to be around someone who loves music as much as he does." |
|
|
|
| On the "Raiders
March"
"A piece like that is deceptively simple to try to find the few right notes that will make a right leitmotivic identification for a character like Indiana Jones. I remember working on that thing for days, changing notes, changing this, inverting that, trying to get something that seemed to me to be just right. I can't speak for my colleagues but for me things which appear to be very simple are not at all, they're only simple after the fact. The manufacture of these things which seem inevitable is a process that can be laborious and difficult." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
On the Hollywood
tradition
"I do think that one can acknowledge a tradition that exists certainly in film ... in silent movies and action movies and serial movies later ... that had music of some kind. All of the comedy and the melodrama that came out of popular entertainment, of vaudeville and peripherally I suppose opera, created a tradition that still is alive in things like RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and Indiana Jones and Hollywood. Whether one studies these things or not as part of the fabric of our entertainment culture and the Hollywood film medium in particular, they've become part of our musical heritage in the aggregate of all of these experiences that we've had over a hundred years now." |
|
|
|
© MH
