John Barry Prendergast, OBE
(3 November 1933 – 30 January 2011)
John Barry was an Oscar winning English film score composer. He was one of the most successful of all film composers; he won five Oscars for scores that included Born Free, Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves, but wrote his best-known and most enduring music for the James Bond films.
He was born John Barry Prendergast in York, England, the son of an Irish man, was raised in and around cinemas in the north of England. His father was a projectionist in the silent movie era and ended up owning a small chain of cinemas, which Barry Snr and Jnr regularly visited.
In his teens, Barry soaked up the soundtrack work of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann, spent a couple of national service years in the British army and graduated towards the burgeoning post-war youth pop market with an outfit called the John Barry Seven.
From there, he moved to television, including BBC's Drumbeat and to youth cult movies such as Beat Girl, his music informed as much by soundtrack composers as by Duane Eddy and Dizzy Gillespie.
Barry’s most fertile creative period was the mid-1960s. The success of his scores for the Bond films led to commissions for numerous other spy films, such as The Ipcress File (1965) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966) and later for the television series The Persuaders. Among Barry’s other scores of this period were those for Zulu (1963), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and the two which brought him his first Oscars: The Lion in Winter (1968), with Peter O’Toole as the ailing King Henry II; and Born Free (1966), the syrupy theme for which also gained him an Oscar for best song.
In 1970 he moved to California and became a tax exile. Although he was still used for Bond films, Barry’s tax problems coincided with a general dip in his fortunes, and his stock did not recover until he was asked to score a Bruce Lee film, Game of Death, in the late 1970s. Thereafter Barry became one of the most sought-after, and richest, film composers in Hollywood. He also won two more Oscars, with the lush yet sophisticated scores for Out of Africa (1985) and Kevin Costner’s revisionist Western, Dances With Wolves (1990).
Beyond the Bond genre he dabbled from time to time with films based on historical events, earning Oscar nominations for the music for both Mary Queen of Scots (1971) and Chaplin (1992). Barry’s last Bond film was The Living Daylights (1987), creating a Top 10 hit for the pop group A-Ha.
He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1998. He won a Bafta Fellowship Award in 2005 and a Max Steiner Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the city of Vienna, in 2009.
Barry was married four times. He married Barbara Pickard in 1958, with whom he had a daughter. He married secondly, in 1965, the actress Jane Birkin; they had a daughter. He married thirdly, in 1969, Jane Sidey. He is survived by his fourth wife, Laurie, whom he married in 1976, and by his four children.
Barry died of a heart attack at his Oyster Bay home, in New York.
RIP
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