One of the pillars of film scoring and the most popular film composer of his era, John Williams has created music for some of the most successful motion pictures in Hollywood history -- Star Wars, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and Harry Potter are just a handful of selections from an extensive catalog that has included over 50 Academy Awards nominations.

After getting his start in television in the late '50s, Williams worked more steadily on feature films by the early '70s, impressing with his stirring orchestral scores for blockbuster disaster films like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974), and The Towering Inferno (1974), as well as through his work with such emerging directors as Robert Altman (1973's The Long Goodbye) and Steven Spielberg (1974's The Sugarland Express). His recurring partnership with Spielberg would span six decades. Williams' ominous, encroaching "Shark Theme" for Spielberg's Jaws in 1975 and his five-note spacecraft melody from 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (penned with Spielberg's note that it should convey "hello") likely would have cemented his stature as the go-to Hollywood composer for sci-fi-adventure-thriller fare even without the colossal success of 1977's Star Wars, his most iconic score.

His instrumental themes from Jaws, Close Encounters, and Star Wars all charted on the Billboard Hot 100, with Star Wars' cracking the Top Ten. Over time, he was recognized for his prowess with more poignant material as well, such as Best Song Oscar nominee "Somewhere in My Memory" from Home Alone and his mournful violin theme (performed by Itzhak Perlman) from his Oscar-winning score for Schindler's List (1993). However, he has remained associated across generations for his lush, exciting, romantic music for other worlds, including the first two Jurassic Park films in the '90s, the first three Harry Potter films in the 2000s, and the episodic Star Wars prequels and sequels. In the early 2020s, as he entered his nineties, Williams set to work on his fifth straight entry in the Indiana Jones film franchise. While not quite as prolific in the concert hall realm, he has composed concertos for no fewer than ten different instruments, among dozens of other orchestral and chamber works.