James Horner, Titanic and Avatarcomposer, wrote for the heart

Film composer James Horner, who died aged 61, scored the best-selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time.

James Horner

When he wrote the music for ­Titanic, James Horner scored the bestselling orchestral film soundtrack of all time, but not everyone was convinced by his work. The film’s main theme, My Heart Will Go On, was sung by Celine Dion and topped charts around the world. Yet the director, James Cameron, initially indicated that he wanted an instrumental score and opposed the inclusion of such a power ballad.

Kate Winslet, whose screen character was the song’s protagonist, confessed that every time she heard it she felt “like throwing up”, while a reluctant Dion so disliked the song that she had to be talked into singing it by her husband and manager, Rene Angelil, and only then was persuaded by Horner to record a demo tape, which he presented to the director after considerable hesitation. Cameron was flabbergasted — and loved it.

By the time Titanic opened in cinemas at the end of 1997, Horner was locked away in his studio working on his next score, unaware of the success of the film and its music until Cameron called him a month later to tell him that the song and the soundtrack album were both No 1 in the Billboard charts. “I think it was at that point that I realised that the music had transcended being film music and that Titanic was taking a place in history,” Horner said.

Rolling Stone subsequently voted My Heart Will Go On one of the worst songs of all time; but the soundtrack’s sales of 27 million, and Horner’s trophy cabinet, which boasted two Oscar statuettes — one for best original score and the other for best song, shared with the lyricist Will Jennings — and a Grammy award were ample compensation.

He had accepted the commission without seeing the script or the footage and worked with sounds that highlighted the dif­ferent social backgrounds of the people on board the doomed ship and anticipated their tragic end.

“To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colours and brushes. I don’t use a computer when I write and I don’t use a piano,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “I’m at a desk writing and it’s very broad strokes and notes as colours on a palette. I think very abstractly when I’m writing. Then as the ­project moves on it becomes more like sculpting.”

Titanic was Horner’s biggest box-office success, but it was only one of more than 100 films in which his music was featured after his breakthrough with the score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in 1982. He went on to work with some of the biggest directors in Hollywood and earned a total of 10 Oscar nominations, including Aliens (1986), Braveheart (1995) and Avatar (2009). He enjoyed a particularly fruitful partnership with Cameron even though they got off to an inauspicious start when the director gave the composer just 10 days to complete the score for Aliens. Horner described it as a “nightmare”.

He later worked with Mel Gibson, who starred in and directed Scottish patriotic drama Brave­heart, which is elevated by Horner’s stirring score even though he chose to use Irish uilleann pipes rather than Scottish pipes because of their greater range of notes.

Cameron was also impressed by the sounds of Braveheart and the two men put aside their previous differences. “My job, and it’s something I discuss with Jim (Cameron) all the time, is to make sure at every turn of the film it’s something the audience can feel with their heart,” he said at the time of Avatar’s release. “When we lose a character, when somebody wins, when somebody loses, when someone disappears — at all times I’m keeping track, constantly, of what the heart is supposed to be feeling. That is my primary role.”

He claimed to have spent two years working up to 18 hours a day on the score for Avatar, which superseded Titanic as the highest grossing film of all time.

The success of Titanic enabled Horner to pick and choose his projects. After years of accepting almost every commission he was offered, he later had no hesitation in rejecting invitations from directors he felt were “asking me to do a formula”. After scoring The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012, he denounced the film as “dreadful” and refused to work on a sequel.

A modest and intensely private individual, he claimed he never listened to his scores again after they had been recorded.

“I lose track of it all. I like to stay invisible,” he said. “I go into my own world when I’m writing and if I know that I’ve done it, that’s where I say I’ve solved this, and I move on to the next.”

He remained prolific and at least three movies he scored are due for release later this year: Southpaw, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Rachel McAdams; Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem; and The 33, a drama based on the 2010 mining disaster in Chile.

A qualified pilot, Horner owned several light aircraft and recently provided the music for a documentary about the subject, Living in the Age of Airplanes. The film was narrated by fellow flying enthusiast Harrison Ford, who crashed a light aircraft he was piloting in March. Ford survived with a broken pelvis, but Horner was killed when his turbo-prop plane crashed in California’s Los Padres National Forest not far from his home in Calabasas, where he lived with wife Sarah and their two daughters.

James Roy Horner was born in 1953 in Los Angeles, where his father Harry Horner, a Jewish immigrant who had arrived in the US from Europe before World War II, worked in Hollywood as a set ­designer. Like his son, he won two Oscars, for The Heiress in 1949 and for The Hustler in 1961.

James Horner began playing the piano at five and spent part of his early life in London, where he attended the Royal College of Music; his accent retained a trace of Britishness all of his life.

Back in Los Angeles, he took a master’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he went on to teach music theory. He left academic life in 1978 to score films for the American Film Institute and, a year later, began working with director Roger Corman on low budget B-movies.

When he was commissioned in 1982 to score Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, he was in his late 20s and very much the new kid on the block. Two years later, Horner returned to score Star Trek III: The Search for Spock; but by 1986, when the fourth Star Trek film was in production, Horner was out of the film’s price range and was already earning his first Oscar nomination on Aliens.

He once likened working for Hollywood to composing for an 18th-century European monarch: “It’s no different than Haydn being kept as a court composer, being paid, having the piece performed and given an orchestra.”

Away from the cinema, he composed Pas de Deux, a concerto for violin and cello, and Collage, a concerto for four horns, which was premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra earlier this year.

For films, his musical leitmotifs included the use of Celtic, choral and electronic elements. He was also noted for reworking classical themes; his two Star Trek scores, for example, drew on works by Prokofiev, a practice that on occasion led to accusations of plagiarism. He was unruffled by the criticism: “Film music is this weird, demonic thing where every score has to be absolutely different from any other score — or so the legal paper says. But if you’re an artist it’s impossible. There’s only so many ways to skin a cat. I find classical music a wondrous world, and I draw from it.”

James Horner. Film composer. Born Los Angeles, August 14, 1953. Died Los Padres National Forest, California, June 22, aged 61.

The Times