John Williams

Williams grew up in a musical household in Queens and Los Angeles, the son of a percussionist who played in radio and film orchestras, and studied piano at Juilliard while working as a jazz pianist in New York clubs to pay his way. He moved into film work as a studio session pianist before graduating to composing for television and then features, initially under the more clipped professional name Johnny Williams.

He is the most recognizable film composer in history. Williams's leitmotif-driven orchestral scores gave the blockbuster era its heartbeat — five notes for aliens, two for sharks, a fanfare for a galaxy far, far away. His breakthrough came scoring disaster films in the early 1970s before Steven Spielberg brought him onto Jaws, a partnership that would define both of their careers and, alongside George Lucas, produce the two defining musical identities of the entire blockbuster era.

He has been nominated for more Academy Awards than any living person and has won five, and his decades-long collaborations with both Spielberg and Lucas make him arguably the single most influential figure in how modern American blockbusters are scored — an entire generation of film composers grew up learning orchestration by transcribing his cues.