About James Newton Howard
James Newton Howard (born June 9, 1951) is an American film composer, orchestrator and music producer. He has scored over 100 films and is the recipient of a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, and nine nominations for Academy Awards. His film scores include Pretty Woman (1990), The Prince of Tides (1991), The Fugitive (1993), Space Jam (1996), The Sixth Sense (1999), Dinosaur (2000), Unbreakable (2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Signs (2002), Treasure Planet (2002), The Village (2004), King Kong (2005), Batman Begins (2005) and its sequel, The Dark Knight (2008) (both composed with Hans Zimmer), Blood Diamond (2006), Michael Clayton (2007), The Hunger Games series (2012–present), the Fantastic Beasts trilogy (2016–2022), and Raya and the Last Dragon (2021). He has collaborated extensively with directors M. Night Shyamalan and Francis Lawrence, having scored eight of Shyamalan's films and eight of Lawrence's films since I Am Legend (2007). He has also worked with other directors such as Peter Jackson, Edward Zwick, Michael Hoffman, P. J. Hogan, Paul Greengrass, Andrew Davis, Lawrence Kasdan, Joe Roth, Martin Campbell, Joe Johnston, Tony Gilroy, Taylor Hackford, Ivan Reitman, Joel Schumacher, and David Yates; conductor Pete Anthony; and violinists Bruce Dukov, and Eun-Mee Ahn. == Early life and career == Howard was born in Los Angeles to Samuel Howard (né Horowitz) and Joan Howard (née Royall). He is from a musical family; his grandmother was a violinist. His father was Jewish but he did not want his children to know he was, so he changed his last name from Horowitz to Howard. Howard began studying music as a child, taking classical piano lessons at the age of four. He went on to attend the Thacher School in Ojai, California and the Music Academy of the West in Montecito, California with Reginald Stewart and Leon Fleischer.
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