Max Steiner

Max Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was an Vienna-born American composer of music for theatre productions and films. He was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as such is often referred to as "the father of film music".

Steiner was the creator of hundreds of film scores, including The Informer (1935), Now, Voyager (1942), and Since You Went Away (1944), all of which won him Academy Awards. He was nominated for the Academy Award a total of twenty six times, a record surpassed only by Alfred Newman and John Williams.

Steiner was one of the best-known composers in Hollywood, and is widely regarded today as one of the greatest film score composers in the history of cinema. He was a frequent collaborator with some of the most famous film directors in history, including John Ford and William Wyler. As well as his Oscar-winning scores, other popular works include King Kong (1933), Little Women (1933), Jezebel (1938), Casablanca (1942), and the film score for which he is possibly best known, Gone with the Wind (1939), which, despite being one of the most popular film soundtracks ever written, failed to win him an Oscar.

The Biography appearing in this section is attributed to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Steiner. Portions of this Biography may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Additional terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details.