John Williams

He married Samantha Winslow, a photographer, in 1980.

John Williams was born on February 8, 1932 in Floral Park, New York, to Esther and Johnny Williams. His father was a jazz percussionist with the CBS radio orchestra.

Owing to his father's profession and interests, music and instruments left an impression in the young boy’s mind and soon he began playing the piano, trumpet, trombone and clarinet.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1948, he attended North Hollywood High School and the University of California, LA. He was also privately tutored by the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco for some time.

In 1952, he was drafted into the U.S. Air Force. He used to conduct and arrange music for the Air Force band till his service ended in 1955.

In 1955, he enrolled at The Julliard School in New York City and studied piano with Rosina Lhevinne. Here, he also began playing in many clubs with Jack Sperling on drums, Bob Bain on guitar and Rolly Bundock on bass.

After his first film composition for ‘Daddy-O’ in 1958, John Williams composed music for films like ‘Peter Gunn’, ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ and TV programs such as ‘Bachelor Father’, the ‘Kraft Suspense Theatre’, ‘Lost in Space’, etc. during the 1960s.

He gained reputation and made a name for himself with the musical scores for the films ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, ‘Images’, ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, ‘The Towering Inferno’, ‘Earthquake’, and ‘The Cowboys’ during the early 1970s.

In 1974, he composed the music for Steven Spielberg's directorial debut 'The Sugarland Express'. This marked the beginning of a very long director-composer bond between them, with John Williams composing for all but two films by Spielberg.

In 1978 he worked with director Richard Donner for the film 'Superman'. The love theme ‘Can You Read My Mind’ appeared in the next four sequels too.

In 1980, he succeeded Arthur Fiedler as the Boston Pops Orchestra's Principal conductor. Years later, he vacated the position for former associate conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Keith Lockhart.

John Williams currently holds the record for the most Oscar nominations for a living person with 50 nominations and is second only to Walt Disney (59 nominations) in the Academy Awards history.

He has won the Academy Award on five different occasions. These include: ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (1971), ‘Jaws’ (1975) and ‘Star Wars’ (1977), ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ (1982) and ‘Schindler's List’ (1993).

In 2003, he was accorded the International Olympic Committee’s highest honor, the Olympic Order. A year later, he received the Kennedy Center Honors.

For his achievements in Symphonic music, he was given the National Medal of Arts in the White House in 2009 and a Ken Burns Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

He has also been inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.