50 Fun Facts About John Williams

John Williams calls himself 'a dinosaur' partly because he writes every film score how?

With pencil and paper, the old-fashioned way: unlike younger colleagues he uses no software and records no keyboard demos for his directors to hear.

Bernard Herrmann said John Williams's father 'isn't afraid to break the head' of what?

Drums: his father was a jazz drummer in the Raymond Scott Quintette who later played timpani for Herrmann, and the young Williams sometimes joined him at rehearsals.

Williams earned Oscar nominations for the score and the carol-like song 'Somewhere in My Memory' from which Christmas comedy?

Home Alone let the composer of Jaws swap menace for joyful carols; the score and its song, with words by Leslie Bricusse, were each nominated for an Academy Award.

Which fellow student, a future Tchaikovsky Competition winner, made Williams think he'd 'better be a composer'?

Van Cliburn and John Browning shared his New York teacher, Rosina Lhévinne; hearing them around the place, he thought, 'If that's the competition, I think I'd better be a composer!'

Williams played the piano riff in Henry Mancini's famous title theme for which television detective series?

Peter Gunn's driving riff was played by a jobbing studio pianist named Williams, who was also at the keyboard on the soundtrack of the film West Side Story.

Under what first name was Williams credited on his early jazz albums and television scores?

Johnny Williams was his professional name until the late 1960s, and it stuck with friends: Steven Spielberg in 2009 and producer Kathleen Kennedy in 2016 both called him Johnny in interviews.

Williams scored Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel for which producer, later Hollywood's 'Master of Disaster'?

Irwin Allen moved from sci-fi television to disaster films and Williams went with him: his scores for The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno both earned Oscar nominations.

Williams's first Academy Award nomination came for which 1967 film?

Valley of the Dolls put him on the Oscar ballot as an adapter, not a composer: the category was for scoring other people's music, here the songs of André and Dory Previn.

Williams's first Oscar was for adapting the score of which 1971 musical?

Fiddler on the Roof won him the adaptation Oscar for bringing Jerry Bock's Broadway songs to the screen, which irritated the composer Bernard Herrmann: 'Write your own music,' he told him.

Which film, released the year before Jaws, was Williams's first with the director he recalled as 'this seventeen-year-old kid'?

The Sugarland Express began with a studio-arranged lunch in a fancy Beverly Hills restaurant, where Williams found that the young Steven Spielberg 'knew more about film music than I did'.

How did Spielberg react when Williams first played him the two-note Jaws theme on the piano?

He thought it was a joke when two notes were picked out on a piano. He later credited the score with half of the film's success.

Why does music stand in for the shark through much of Jaws?

The model kept failing: the mechanical shark broke down so often that Spielberg mostly suggested the beast and let Williams's two notes announce it.

Which 1972 Robert Altman thriller did Williams score with eerie avant-garde effects for piano, percussion and strings?

Images is the score he brought up when asked in 2020 for a lesser-known favourite: had he never worked in film, he said, his concert music 'might have been in this vein'.

How many notes make up the famous alien communication motif in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Five notes and no more, the director insisted, because a longer phrase would be a melody and not a signal; Williams wrote more than 300 candidates before the two settled on one.

What did Williams call the theme he wrote for Indiana Jones in the hero's first film?

The Raiders March is really two tunes: Williams played Spielberg two candidate themes, the director asked for both, and one became the main theme and the other its bridge.

Spielberg so liked Williams's music for E.T.'s final chase that he did what?

Re-edited the film to match the score, as Williams tells it; Spielberg has said he will sometimes run to the editing room to adjust a cut to the music. E.T. won Williams his fourth Oscar.

When Williams said Spielberg needed 'a better composer' for Schindler's List, what did Spielberg reply?

'I know, but they're all dead' was said very sweetly, Williams recalls: the rough cut had left him too choked up to speak, and he paced the room for minutes before suggesting someone better.

Which violinist performs the main theme of Schindler's List?

Itzhak Perlman was the soloist Williams hired for the film's heartbreakingly simple theme, at the director's suggestion by one account; the score brought the composer his fifth Oscar.

For which Spielberg film did Williams write a national anthem for the fictional country of Krakozhia?

The Terminal strands Tom Hanks's traveller in a New York airport after a coup back home in Krakozhia voids his passport; Williams gave the invented nation a suitably pompous anthem.

Which animated feature was the first one Williams scored?

The Adventures of Tintin was a first in animation for composer and director alike; Steven Spielberg had come to the comics only after a review compared his first Indiana Jones film to them.

Which music producer scored and co-produced The Color Purple, one of the few Spielberg features Williams did not score?

Quincy Jones, the producer behind Michael Jackson's Thriller, made his film-producing debut here as well as scoring it; the film went to the Oscars with eleven nominations, one for his score, and won none.

Williams wrote his Schindler's List score in the same year as which blockbuster for the same director?

Jurassic Park and Schindler's List both reached cinemas in 1993, so within months he went from soaring dinosaur fanfares to a grieving violin theme; the two scores, one guide says, couldn't be more different.

Which theme did Williams introduce in The Empire Strikes Back for Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire?

The Imperial March is nowhere in the 1977 original: Williams did not think of it until he was scoring the sequel, so Darth Vader spent his whole first film without his famous tune.

In his Rise of Skywalker cameo, Williams plays a bartender whose name is an anagram of what?

Maestro, rearranged, gives Oma Tres, the name the credits give the silent barman of Kijimi, played by the composer behind a mechanical eyepatch; the shelves behind him are dressed with nods to his earlier films.

Which ensemble recorded Williams's score for George Lucas's original 1977 space opera?

The London Symphony Orchestra's trumpeter Maurice Murphy joined on the first day of recording, and the first thing he played was the opening fanfare's high C; the players roared when he hit it.

Richard Donner said the three-note motif in the theme of his 1978 Man of Steel epic evoked what?

The word 'Superman' fits the fanfare's three punched notes, SU-per-MAN; asked decades later whether there was anything in the director's theory, Williams replied, 'There's everything to that.'

Williams scored which 1976 caper about a fake psychic hunting a missing heir, Alfred Hitchcock's final film?

Family Plot came a year after Jaws; when Williams remarked that gloomy music seemed right for a murder, Hitchcock replied, 'Mr. Williams, murder can be fun.'

Which American news programme took Williams's orchestral suite The Mission as its theme in 1985?

NBC Nightly News first played it on 9 September 1985, and other movements went to Today and Meet the Press; the network wanted an orchestral sound to stand apart from the synthesised news themes of the day.

Williams scored only the first three films of which series?

Harry Potter kept his music long after he left: Hedwig's Theme, written for the first film, runs through all eight, reworked by the three composers who followed him.

Hedwig's Theme opens on which bell-like instrument, playing alone before the orchestra joins?

Celesta carries the tune by itself at the start; Williams wrote the theme as promotional music before he was hired, the studio's test of whether he suited the film.

In 1980 Williams took over the Boston Pops from which conductor, who had led it since 1930?

Arthur Fiedler had led the Pops for half a century, until his death in 1979; Williams stayed fourteen seasons, and its television broadcasts turned a studio composer into an in-demand public conductor.

Why did Williams briefly resign from the Boston Pops in 1984?

Players hissed while sight-reading his new piece, so he walked off the stage and resigned; he came back after the musicians apologised and management pleaded, and stayed nine more years.

Which cellist premiered Williams's cello concerto with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood in 1994?

Yo-Yo Ma gave the first performance of a concerto the Boston Symphony had commissioned, with Williams himself conducting; concert works for star soloists have increasingly filled the composer's time between films.

Williams's bassoon concerto, premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1995, has what title?

It was written for principal bassoonist Judith LeClair; TreeSong and Heartwood are later works for violin and cello.

Williams's inauguration piece Air and Simple Gifts is based on a hymn made famous by which composer?

Aaron Copland used the old Shaker tune in his ballet Appalachian Spring; on the freezing day itself the all-star quartet played along to a recording made two days earlier, for fear the cold would crack their instruments.

For which Summer Olympics did Williams write his first Olympic theme?

Los Angeles in 1984 had Hollywood on its doorstep, and its organisers commissioned the Olympic Fanfare and Theme, the first of four Olympic pieces he would write; the recording won him a Grammy.

Which orchestra did Williams conduct for the first time in January 2020?

The Vienna Philharmonic's brass players asked during rehearsals to add a march he had left off the programme, and he called their playing of it one of the best he had heard; he was weeks from his 88th birthday.

Who is the only person with more Academy Award nominations than John Williams?

Walt Disney collected 59 nominations, most of them as the producer of his studio's films; Williams's 54, as of the 2024 ceremony, are the most of any living person.

Which actor joked that Williams's music followed him into a colonoscopy?

Harrison Ford sighed at the 2016 AFI tribute to Williams that the music follows him everywhere: on stage, off stage, and even in the operating room at his colonoscopy.

Williams's son Joseph has been lead singer of which rock band?

Toto took him on as lead singer in 1986, four years after 'Africa', so the voice on the band's biggest hit is not his; film fans know him as the singing voice of the grown-up Simba in The Lion King.

Barbara Ruick, Williams's first wife, co-starred in which 1956 film musical, the source of 'You'll Never Walk Alone'?

Carousel cast her as Carrie Pipperidge while her future husband, then a young studio pianist, contributed orchestrations without credit; the two had been at school together and married that year.

What did Queen Elizabeth II award Williams in 2022 'for services to film music'?

An honorary knighthood, so as an American he may write KBE after his name but is not Sir John; he and the media executive Bob Iger were the last two honorary knights the Queen approved.

Which Williams score did the American Film Institute rank first on its list of the 25 greatest film scores?

Star Wars topped a list unveiled at a 2005 Hollywood Bowl concert, where the orchestra counted down the 25 by playing an excerpt from each score while scenes from the films ran on screen.

In 2018 Williams announced he would leave his scores and sketchbooks to which school, where he had studied piano?

The Juilliard School gave him its President's Medal at the alumni event where he announced the gift; he had gone there in 1955 for lessons with the piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne, only to find he wrote better than he played.

Which band took the stage on a world tour to Williams's flying theme from E.T.?

Coldplay's Chris Martin, who counts E.T. among his inspirations, explains in the 2024 documentary Music by John Williams why the band walks on to its flying theme.

Why did Williams's composition teacher Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco leave Italy for America?

Mussolini's race laws of 1938 made him leave the next year, his music already pulled from Italian radio; in Hollywood he wrote for MGM and taught a generation of film composers, Henry Mancini and Jerry Goldsmith among them.

Williams's first film score was a tourist film for which Canadian province, where the US Air Force had stationed him?

Newfoundland's tourist office got the short, You Are Welcome, from an airman in his early twenties who spent his service conducting and arranging for military bands; by one account it was the job that hooked him on film scoring.

Which low-budget B-movie was the first feature film Williams scored?

Daddy-O is a hot-rod picture about a street-racing truck driver, sent out on a double bill with Roadracers; its composer, a gifted jazz stylist, spent the next several years mostly on comedies.

Which violinist recorded Williams's film themes on the album Across the Stars?

Anne-Sophie Mutter begged him for just a few bars, then sent a box of Christmas cookies; he gave in with a piece called Markings, and the album of film themes rearranged for her violin came next.

Which honour, the IOC's highest for an individual, did Williams receive in 2003?

The Olympic Order came a year after his fourth Games theme, for Salt Lake City, in which a choir sings the Olympic motto in Latin; he added a fourth word of his own, Clarius.