John Addison

MAIN

Recommend (0)

•

Comments (0)

BIRTHDAY

March 16, 1920

West Chobham, Surrey, England, United Kingdom

DIED

December 07, 1998

RECENT CREDITS

The Importance of Being Earnest (FILM) May. 22, 2002

The Mummy Returns (FILM) May. 4, 2001

Shakespeare in Love (FILM) Dec. 25, 1998

Elizabeth (FILM) Nov. 6, 1998

Velvet Goldmine (FILM) Nov. 6, 1998

View all John Addison Credits

BIOGRAPHY

Expand Full Bio

A versatile, prolific talent who entered films in the late 1940s and quickly proved equally adept at scoring comedy or drama, John Addison hit a creative peak a decade later with the British film renaissance. He composed sprightly classical melodies as well as moody jazz scores for the "Angry Young Men" films of the 1960s, as evidenced by his significant contribution to a goodly number of Tony Richardson films, including "Look Back in Anger" (1959), "The Entertainer" (1960), "A Taste of Honey" (1961), "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" (1962) and the Oscar-winning, "Tom Jones" (1963).

In the 1970s, Addison relocated to California where he continued to provide scores for such films as "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" (1976) and Richard Attenborough's WWII-epic "A Bridge Too Far" (1977). The prolific composer found a new outlet in TV, providing the memorable theme to the long-running CBS series "Murder, She Wrote" (1984-96) as well as the scores for a variety of miniseries (e.g., "Centennial", NBC 1978-79; "Ellis Island", CBS 1984) TV-movies (e.g., "A Death in Canaan", CBS 1978), and other series (i.e., "Nero Wolfe", NBC 1981). Addison continued to compose classical pieces as well, including the Bassoon Concertina which had its premiere in Manchester in 1998.

Collapse Full Bio