MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Shirley Walker died on November 30, 2006, in Reno, Nevada, from complications following a stroke. She was 61.

Born Shirley Anne Rogers in April 1945, in Napa, California, Walker was a musical prodigy. She had an early start performing as a teenager at various hotels, jazz and art bands in tje 1960s, and later attended both San Francisco State University and Berkeley. She began her professional music career in the late 1970s, and for several years she wrote jingles and composed for industrial films.

Her career in film began in 1979, when she was hired to play the synthesizers on Carmine Coppola’s score for Apocalypse Now, and she quickly established herself as one of the most in-demand arrangers, conductors, and orchestrators in Hollywood, working notably with composers such as Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, and Brad Fiedel. Notably, she is credited for being a major influence on the symphonic style Elfman adopted on scores like Scrooged, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands.

Walker was one of the few female film score composers working in Hollywood during her career, and became one of the first female composers to earn a solo score credit on a major Hollywood motion picture when she was hired to score John Carpenter’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man in  1992. Her work on the animated super-hero film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993) remains a standout achievement, praised for its operatic intensity and emotional complexity; this film also initiated her long-standing relationship with DC Animation, as over the course of the next decade she would write music for shows such as Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, The Flash, The New Batman Adventures, and Batman Beyond, among many others.

Her other major film credits include Escape from L.A. (1996, co-written with John Carpenter), Turbulence (1997), Final Destination (2000), Final Destination 2 (2003), Willard (2003), and Final Destination 3, which was released earlier this year. She also wrote the entire score for Chicago Joe and the Showgirl in 1990, which was credited to Hans Zimmer for legal reasons.

She served as a Board Member (1986–1994) and Vice President (1988–1992) for The Society of Composers & Lyricists. For her work on Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond, Walker won two Daytime Emmys in 1998 and 2001, respectively.

Walker was pre-deceased by her husband, Don Walker, who died earlier in 2006, and is survived by her two sons, Ian and Colin.