Archive
Laurie Johnson, 1927-2024
Composer Laurie Johnson died on January 16, 2024, at home in London after a short illness. He was 95.
Laurence Reginald Ward Johnson was born in London in February 1927. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music, where one of his tutors was Ralph Vaughan Williams. He undertook his national service, playing French horn with the Coldstream Guards, in the late 1940s, before moving to the entertainment industry in the 1950s.
He began his career as a composer and arranger in the West End theater, and he won an Ivor Novello Award in 1959 for his work on Lionel Bart’s Lock Up Your Daughters in 1959. He scored his first film, the British musical The Good Companions, in 1957, and went on to enjoy a long career in the British film music industry, writing for projects such as the swashbuckler The Moonraker (1958), the crime drama Tiger Bay (1959), Stanley Kubrick’s classic satire Dr. Strangelove (1964), the HG Wells science-fiction adaptation First Men in the Moon (1964), the cult Hammer horror Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1972), the nature drama The Belstone Fox (1973), and the literary drama Hedda (1975), as well as a series of 1980s TV movies based on the works of his long-time friend, novelist Dame Barbara Cartland. Read more…
Shop at the Movie Music UK Store
Member of the
MOVIE MUSIC UK 