James Newton Howard

Biography

Though Howard now has a reputation as a composer of movie scores, his early musical career was as a performer. He toured with Elton John in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, playing keyboard, and he assisted with several of John’s studio albums. He moved into film music in the middle of the 1980s, and his breakthrough within that field was his work on Pretty Woman, the 1990 vehicle forJulia Roberts and Richard Gere. Later, Howard became associated with the director M. Night Shyamalan, and has scored all of Shyamalan’s movies since 1999, starting with The Sixth Sense that year. He has also worked on the scores of two 21st century Batman movies: in each case he collaborated Hans Zimmer, another of the contemporary giants of film scoring. The director of those movies, Christopher Nolan, has said that Howard and Zimmer were "amazing in accomodating" his vision of the characters in that movie, including of course the title figure.