MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Dominic Frontiere died on December 21, 2017, in his home in Tesuque, New Mexico, after a short illness. He was 86.

Dominic Carmen Frontiere was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in June 1931. A classically trained accordion prodigy who performed at Carnegie Hall as a teenager, Frontiere went on to study at the Juilliard School before beginning a career in Hollywood that spanned more than four decades. He first gained recognition as musical director at 20th Century Fox, where he collaborated with Alfred Newman and contributed to a variety of studio productions.

His association with director and producer Leslie Stevens led to Frontiere scoring his first major film, The Marriage-Go-Round, in 1961. That relationship led Frontiere to became an executive of the television and film production company Daystar Productions, a company Stevens run. He composed several famous television themes of the 1960s, such as those for The Outer Limits, The Rat Patrol, Branded, and The Flying Nun, as well as The Invaders, The Fugitive, and 12 O’Clock High for producer Quinn Martin.

In cinema, he earned acclaim for his scores to films including Hang ‘Em High (1968), starring Clint Eastwood, and Freebie and the Bean (1974) while his score for The Stunt won a Golden Globe Award and earned him a Grammy nomination in 1980. Other notable films scored by Frontiere include On Any Sunday in 1971, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold in 1975, Brannigan in 1975, The Aviator in 1985, and Color of Night in 1994, which was his final major work.

Frontiere was involved in a notorious scandal in 1986 when he was incarcerated for nine months in a federal penitentiary after scalping tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl, which he obtained through his then-wife, Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere. He was estimated to have scalped as many as 16,000 tickets, making a half million dollars in profit that he did not report to the Internal Revenue Service. Frontiere pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year and one day in prison, three years probation, and fined $15,000 for failing to report income from the sale of the tickets and for lying to the IRS. Georgia filed for divorce shortly after Dominic’s release from prison.

He is survived by his children and grandchildren.