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Aug 7, 2023 · 15 women film composers at the top of the industry, and their greatest soundtracks so far. 7 August 2023, 11:04. Germaine Franco, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Rachel Portman (L-R) are just some of the multi-award-winning composers named on this list. Picture: Getty images
- Sophia Alexandra Hall
- Elle (Anne Dudley) Director Paul Verhoeven has struck up several successful partnerships with composers in the past, from Rogier van Otterloo (Turkish Delight, Soldier of Orange) to Basil Poledouris (RoboCop, Starship Troopers) to Jerry Goldsmith (Basic Instinct, Total Recall), and from there a lot of powerful and masculine scores.
- Belle (Rachel Portman) Another English composer with an Academy Award — for Emma in 1996 — Rachel Portman is perhaps the biggest name when it comes to contemporary female composers, with pictures such as Chocolat and Never Let Me Go to her name.
- Wilde (Debbie Wiseman) An example of the talent in the female field that is ignored in favor of inferior composers, Debbie Wiseman has been writing for film and television since the mid-80’s but has never really been given the opportunities deserved.
- Manchester By The Sea (Lesley Barber) Canadian composer Lesley Barber has been writing film music since 1995 but has only recently begun to receive mainstream plaudits with the acclaimed drama Manchester By The Sea in 2016.
- 12 Hildur Guðnadóttir
- 11 Lesley Barber
- 10 Rachel Portman
- 9 Debbie Wiseman
- 8 Isobel Waller-Bridge
- 7 Germaine Franco
- 6 Jocelyn Pook
- 5 Anne Dudley
- 4 Angela Morley
- 3 Elisabeth Lutyens
Hildur Guðnadóttir is an exquisite composer for both movies and TV. Guðnadóttir’s first composer role for a feature film was The Bleeding House, a horror movie directed by Philip Gelatt. She composed the score for Garth Davis’ Mary Magdalene, which starred Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix as Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Her most notable work for TV is ...
Lesley Barber began her musical journey at age 10, and since then, she has had a long and impressive career as a movie composer. In 1999, she composed the score for an adaptation of Mansfield Park starring Frances O’Connor. She also scored Mindy Kaling’s movie Late Night, which starred Kaling alongside Emma Thompson. Barber’s best work is her score...
Someone who has deservedly received great acclaim is Rachel Portman. Her score for the 1996 adaptation of Emma starring Gwyneth Paltrow won her the Oscar for Best Original Score. She was subsequently nominated a further two times in 1999 and 2000 for The Cider House Rules and Chocolat. Portman has worked on countless recognizable scores. There are ...
Debbie Wiseman has been composing film scores since the 1980s. She is a pillar of the British film and TV industry. One of her earliest major scores was for Tom & Viv, a biographical drama about T.S. Eliot and his wife, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, though not for Best Original Score. Perhaps most famously she scored Wilde, Stephen Fr...
Isobel Waller-Bridge is a composer with a growing and incredibly diverse body of work. Early in her career, she worked on the miniseries War & Peace and Vanity Fair. Next came Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, which exposed many new ears to her work with its success. The contrast of her, at times, operatic score for Fleabag with her electronic score ...
Another Oscar nominee, Germaine Franco was nominated for Best Original Score in 2021 for creating the score for Disney’s Encanto. Franco was also the first Latina to be nominated for the category: prior to this, only white women had been nominated, making her achievement even more special. Besides Encanto, Franco’s work is wide-reaching. From the m...
Jocelyn Pook has had an interesting career in which her most memorable piece of work was her first feature-length score. After hearing her solo album Deluge, director Stanley Kubrick called Pook and asked her to work on Eyes Wide Shut with him. She tells Dazed that “it came completely out of the blue,” and that she was “incredibly daunted” by the t...
As a composer, producer, keyboardist, and conductor, Anne Dudley has accomplished a great deal so far in her career. She won a Best Original Score Oscar for her work on The Full Monty. With the amount of work Dudley has done, it would be surprising if a film lover hadn’t come across one of her scores before. From the classic Say Anything, to The Cr...
One of the most important and pioneering figures in the world of women film composers, Angela Morley scored the first two nominations for a woman for Best Original Score. Not only that, but she was also transgender and a lesbian, making her also the first (openly) transgender person to be nominated for an Academy Award. She stands as proof of trans...
Another composing pioneer, Elisabeth Lutyens was the first woman to compose music for a British feature film. She was born in 1906 and by the age of nine had ambitions to become a composer. The detective movie Penny and the Pownall Case was her first feature-length score, though the majority of her work was in short films. Lutyens mostly worked on ...
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- Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) Delia Derbyshire was born in 1937 in the English city of Coventry. On this side of the pond, her name is likely unfamiliar to you—unless you are a Doctor Who fan.
- Shirley Walker (1945-2006) Shirley Walker was an American composer and conductor, born in Napa, California in 1945. She composed for film and television at a time when very few women were actively working in Hollywood.
- Angela Morley (1924-2009) Angela Morley was born in Leeds Yorkshire, in 1924 under the name Walter Stott. She was musically inclined from an early age, learning a variety of instruments before even reaching adolescence.
- Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) Wendy Carlos is best-known for her innovations in electronic music, which played a huge role in her film scores. Born Walter Carlos in 1936, she quickly showed an inclination towards music.
- Hildegard Von Bingen. As one of the most influential composers of the Middle Ages, Hildegard von Bingen was born as the youngest of 10 children. Experiencing visions at an early age, when she was only eight years old, her parents pledged her and her dowry to the church where her musical skills were developed as she learned how to play a ten-stringed psaltery.
- Clara Schumann. Notable female composer Clara Schumann was born in Germany in the early 19th century and was considered one of the best pianists of the time.
- Fanny Mendelssohn. Up next is Fanny Mendelssohn, a German composer from the early 19th century. She was one of the first female composers in the world to have her works published in books read around the world.
- Lili Boulanger. Considered a child prodigy, Lili Boulanger was a French composer who mastered many different instruments and was also the sister of another famous French composer, Nadia Boulanger.
May 3, 2021 · And while male composers such as John Williams and Hans Zimmer get plenty of media attention, String Ovation wants to focus your attention on five successful female film composers to inspire you. 1. Anne Dudley. Anne Dudley is a British composer who achieved star-level when she landed an Oscar for her comedic Full Monty score.
The following is a list of female film score composers . Anita Andreis, Croatian. Pilar Onares, Spain. Rachita Arora, Indian. Malini Awasthi, Indian. Lesley Barber (born 1962), Canadian. Elsa Barraine (1910–1999), French. Bebe Barron (born 1926), American. P. Bhanumathi (1925–2005), Indian.
