MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Basil Poledouris died at his home in Los Angeles on November 8, 2006, at the age of 61, following a battle with cancer.

One of the most distinctive American film composers of the 1980s and 1990s, Poledouris became renowned for muscular orchestral writing, powerful choral music and an unusually direct melodic style. His scores for Conan the Barbarian, RoboCop, The Hunt for Red October, Free Willy and Starship Troopers remain among the most admired works of their respective genres.

Vassilis Konstantinos Poledouris was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on August 21, 1945, into a Greek-American family. He began playing piano as a child and moved to Los Angeles in 1964 to study filmmaking and music at the University of Southern California. There he became friends with aspiring directors including George Lucas, John Milius and Randal Kleiser, relationships that would prove important throughout his career. He briefly considered filmmaking and even appeared as an extra in an episode of Star Trek, but increasingly concentrated on composition.

After graduation Poledouris spent several years writing for educational films and television before receiving his first significant feature assignment from Milius. Big Wednesday (1978), the director’s nostalgic surfing drama, began a particularly important collaboration and allowed Poledouris to combine broad orchestral writing with music reflecting the California surfing culture of the 1960s. Randal Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon (1980) followed, providing a very different opportunity for lush romantic and tropical music.

His breakthrough came with Milius’s Conan the Barbarian (1982). Poledouris created an immense musical landscape dominated by brass, percussion, strings and chorus, drawing on medieval, classical and archaic influences rather than conventional Hollywood fantasy music. Pieces such as “Anvil of Crom” and the choral “Riders of Doom” gave Arnold Schwarzenegger’s largely silent hero a musical voice of extraordinary power. The score subsequently became regarded as one of the landmarks of fantasy film music. Poledouris returned for the lighter Conan the Destroyer in 1984.

The remainder of the decade established him as a leading composer of action and adventure. He reunited with Milius for Red Dawn (1984) and Farewell to the King (1989), while other films included Paul Verhoeven’s medieval adventure Flesh+Blood (1985), Iron Eagle (1986) and No Man’s Land (1987). For Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), Poledouris created one of his most characteristic scores, combining pounding metallic percussion and aggressive brass with a surprisingly noble theme for the murdered police officer transformed into a machine. The contrast between mechanical brutality and human emotion became central to the film’s identity.

Television produced another career highlight with the epic western miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989). Its sweeping Americana, warm character themes and expansive orchestral writing brought Poledouris the Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition, the principal major award of his career.

The 1990s opened with John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October (1990), whose memorable “Hymn to Red October” combined Russian-language male chorus with electronics and orchestra to suggest both Soviet military power and the grandeur of the submarine itself. Poledouris’s other major scores during the decade included Quigley Down Under (1990), Flight of the Intruder (1991), Free Willy (1993), On Deadly Ground (1994), Under Siege 2 (1995), Switchback (1997) and Les Misérables (1998).

Free Willy revealed the gentler side of Poledouris’s musical personality. Its soaring principal theme conveyed the relationship between a boy and an orca with warmth and emotional directness, becoming one of his most popular scores. At the opposite extreme was another collaboration with Verhoeven, Starship Troopers (1997), for which Poledouris wrote enormous martial themes and ferocious action music that simultaneously embraced and subtly exaggerated the film’s militaristic imagery.

Away from conventional film scoring, Poledouris composed “The Tradition of the Games” for the opening ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games and wrote music for television, IMAX films and theme-park attractions, including The Adventures of Conan at Universal Studios. His later film assignments became less frequent, and he spent increasing amounts of time on Vashon Island in Washington, where he pursued his lifelong passion for sailing.

Poledouris was diagnosed with cancer in 2005. In July 2006, only months before his death, he travelled to Spain to conduct a concert devoted to his music at the Úbeda Film Music Festival, including a major live performance of Conan the Barbarian. His final screen work included the television film The Legend of Butch & Sundance. He is survived by his daughters Zoë and Alexis; Zoë Poledouris also became a composer, musician and actress.