John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. He has composed some of the most popular and recognizable film scores in cinematic history, including those of the Star Wars saga, Jaws , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Superman , Raiders of the Lost Ark , E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , the Indiana Jones films, Jurassic Park , and Schindler’s List .
Williams has been associated with director Steven Spielberg since 1974, composing music for all but four of his feature films. Other notable works by Williams include theme music for the Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football , “The Mission” theme used by NBC News, the television series Lost in Space and Land of the Giants , and the incidental music for the first season of Gilligan’s Island .
He has composed numerous classical concerti and other works for orchestral ensembles and solo instruments; he served as the Boston Pops’ principal conductor from 1980 to 1993, and is now the orchestra’s laureate conductor.
He has won five Academy Awards , four Golden Globe Awards (including the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2007), seven British Academy Film Awards , and 22 Grammy Awards . With 50 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most-nominated individual, after Walt Disney . In 2005, the American Film Institute selected Williams’s score to 1977’s Star Wars as the greatest American film score of all time. The soundtrack to Star Wars was additionally preserved by the Library of Congress into the National Recording Registry , for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
