John Williams

• 1. Introduction

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  John Williams played two notes for Steven Spielberg, alternating, low and ominous, and Spielberg laughed because he thought it was a joke. The film was Jaws. Williams stood his ground. The simple idea won, and that two-note pattern became shorthand for danger itself. This was a man who had once planned to be a concert pianist. He changed course only after hearing players he judged better than himself, deciding he could write better than he could play. Born on the 8th of February 1932 in Queens, New York City, Williams would spend a seven-decade career composing many of the best known scores in film history. He has gathered 54 Academy Award nominations, second only to Walt Disney. How does a jazz drummer's son end up the most-nominated living person at the Oscars? Why did a teenage director trust him with a shark, then a galaxy? And what makes a melody stick so hard that fans hear a film the moment they hear its theme? The answers run from a department store in Bangor, Maine, to a knighthood from a queen.

• 2. From Bangor To Juilliard

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  Williams's father was a jazz drummer and percussionist who played with the Raymond Scott Quintet, and the boy grew up close to him. He once described his roots plainly: "My father was a Maine man. My father's parents ran a department store in Bangor, Maine, and my mother's father was a cabinetmaker." His mother came from Boston. He had an older sister, Joan, and two younger brothers, Jerry and Don, who would later play on his film scores. The elder Williams collaborated with Bernard Herrmann, and his son sometimes sat in on rehearsals. In 1948 the family moved to Los Angeles, where John attended North Hollywood High School and graduated in 1950. He studied composition privately with the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and spent one semester at Los Angeles City College playing in its studio jazz band. In 1951 he joined the U.S. Air Force, arranging and conducting for its band, stationed at Pepperrell Air Force Base in St. John's, Newfoundland. After his service he moved to New York City in 1955 to study piano with Rosina Lhevinne at Juilliard. He never enrolled in courses there and never graduated, taking private lessons in her practice room instead. Hearing pianists like John Browning and Van Cliburn convinced him to switch from performance to composition. To pay his way, he worked the city's jazz clubs as a pianist.

• 3. The Sideman Years

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  Before his name sat above a film, Williams played the piano inside other men's scores. He recorded with Henry Mancini on Peter Gunn in 1959, on Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961, and on Charade in 1963, even playing the piano part of the guitar-piano ostinato in Mancini's Peter Gunn theme. He performed the score for Elmer Bernstein on To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. He was the pianist on Billy Wilder's The Apartment in 1960 and on West Side Story in 1961. One early job placed him under his mentor Alfred Newman, in an uncredited orchestral role for Carousel in 1956, a film that happened to star his soon-to-be wife, Barbara Ruick. He also led a double life on record, releasing jazz albums under the name Johnny Williams, among them Jazz Beginnings, World on a String and The John Towner Touch. His first film composition came in 1952, while he was still in the Air Force, for a Newfoundland tourism promotional film titled You Are Welcome. His first feature score followed with Daddy-O in 1958, and television soon filled his days. He scored Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants, all from producer Irwin Allen, and wrote for the pilot of Gilligan's Island.

• 4. The Spielberg Pact

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  Steven Spielberg, preparing his feature debut, heard Williams's work on The Reivers and The Cowboys and asked for him. Their first meeting, over lunch in a fancy Beverly Hills restaurant, left Williams charmed. He recalled meeting "this seventeen-year-old kid, this very sweet boy, who knew more about film music than I did, every Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin score." That 1974 film was The Sugarland Express, and it began a partnership in which Williams scored all but five of Spielberg's feature films. The hardest of them was Schindler's List in 1993. After watching a rough cut, Williams was so moved he doubted himself, telling Spielberg, "I really think you need a better composer than I am for this film." Spielberg answered, "I know, but they're all dead." Williams asked the violinist Itzhak Perlman to play the main theme. For E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982, Spielberg admired the music for the climactic chase so much that he re-edited the film to match it. On Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the two built a five-note motif that served as both score and the aliens' own communication signal. In October 2025 came word of Disclosure Day, set to be their thirtieth collaboration.

• 5. Galaxies And Wizards

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  George Lucas needed a composer for a space opera, and Spielberg pointed him to his friend. Williams answered Star Wars in 1977 with a grand symphonic score, drawing on Gustav Holst's suite The Planets and on Golden Age Hollywood composers Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Critics called it Wagnerian for its leitmotifs, though Williams brushed the comparison aside, saying "I have been in the big river swimming with all of them." The recording remains the highest grossing non-popular music recording of all time. He returned in 1980 with The Empire Strikes Back, introducing "The Imperial March" as Darth Vader's theme. Lucas's prequels brought "Duel of the Fates," an aggressive choral piece built on harsh Sanskrit lyrics in the style of Verdi's Requiem, an unusual turn for a composer who generally preferred brass to voices. The sequel trilogy carried him to his 50th Academy Award nomination for The Force Awakens, and he even appears in The Rise of Skywalker as Oma Tres, a Kijimi bartender. Across town he scored the first three Harry Potter films and wrote "Hedwig's Theme," which followed the series through every later installment. Fans came to identify each of these films with his music alone, just as they did with Jaws, Superman and Indiana Jones.

• 6. The Pops And The Concert Hall

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  From 1980 to 1993 Williams led the Boston Pops as principal conductor, succeeding Arthur Fiedler, a man he never met in person but spoke to by telephone. The tenure nearly ended early. In 1984 some players hissed while sight-reading a new Williams composition in rehearsal, and he walked out and resigned. After the management's pleas and personal apologies from the musicians, he withdrew the resignation and stayed nine more years. He is now the Pops' laureate conductor. Away from the screen, he has written a deep catalogue of concert music. His bassoon concerto, The Five Sacred Trees, was premiered by the New York Philharmonic and its principal bassoon, Judith LeClair, in 1995. A cello concerto reached its premiere with Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1994. For the first inauguration of Barack Obama he composed Air and Simple Gifts, built on the hymn "Simple Gifts" made famous by Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring; he chose it because he knew Obama admired Copland. The quartet was performed by Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Gabriela Montero and Anthony McGill. In January 2020 he led the Vienna Philharmonic, his first engagement with a European orchestra, and the resulting album became the bestselling orchestral album of that year.

• 7. A Life In Honors

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  Williams holds the record for the most Oscar nominations of any living person and stands second in the award's entire history, behind Walt Disney's 59. He is the only person nominated for an Academy Award in seven consecutive decades. At age 91 he became the oldest person ever nominated in any category. His five Oscar wins came for Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Schindler's List. In 2005 the American Film Institute placed his Star Wars score first on its list of the 100 greatest film scores, with Jaws and E.T. also making the cut. The Library of Congress entered the Star Wars soundtrack into the National Recording Registry. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2004, the National Medal of the Arts in 2009, and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2016. In 2022 Queen Elizabeth II awarded him an honorary knighthood "for services to film music," among the final two such honors of her reign. His personal life threaded through it all. He married Barbara Ruick in 1956, and they remained together until her death in 1974. Their son Joseph became the lead singer of Toto. On the 29th of April 2026 the John Williams Performing Arts Center was named in his honor at North Hollywood High School, the school he left in 1950.