MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer John Addison died on December 7, 1998, at his home in Bennington, Vermont, after a short illness. He was 78.

John Mervyn Addison was born in Chobham, Surrey, England, in March 1920, and studied composition at the Royal College of Music. His education was interrupted by service in World War II, where he served with distinction in the British Army, seeing action in Normandy and the Netherlands, and participating in Operation Market Garden. The experience would later inform one of his best-known works: the rousing score to A Bridge Too Far (1977), a film about the Allied operation that Addison survived.

Addison’s breakthrough in film came in 1950 with the British thriller Seven Days to Noon, and over the course of the subsequent decade he wrote scores for popular British films such as The Man Between (1953), The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), Three Men in a Boat (1956), Lucky Jim (1957), A Taste of Honey (1961), and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

It was Addison’s sparkling, Oscar-winning score for Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones in 1963 that brought him international recognition. The music’s vivacious period stylings, full of energy and wit, became a defining element of the film’s success. Following his Oscar win Addison split his time between the UK and Hollywood, and in the years thereafter he composed scores for films such as Smashing Time (1967), The Honey Pot (1967), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Sleuth (1972, his second Oscar nomination), Swashbuckler (1976), and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), earning both critical acclaim and popular success. Notably, Addison also composed the replacement score for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Torn Curtain in 1966, which is now remembered as the film which ended Hitchcock’s relationship with Bernard Herrmann.

Addison was equally active in television, composing the original theme for Murder, She Wrote, which ran for 12 seasons and earned him an Emmy Award in 1985. He also wrote music for the theater, a ballet for Sadler’s Wells first performed at the 1953 Edinburgh Festival, and was an acclaimed concert and and classical composer.

He is survived by his wife, Pamela, and four children.