The Lord of the Rings composer started out naming the Blues Brothers
Before Howard Shore won three Oscars for The Lord of the Rings, he led the house band on Saturday Night Live, once performing in a beekeeper suit, and suggested the name Blues Brothers to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. A summer-camp friendship with Lorne Michaels opened that door.
Shore was born in Toronto on October 18, 1946, to Jewish parents, Bernice and Mac Shore. He began music lessons at about eight or nine, picked up a string of instruments and was playing in bands by his early teens. At 13 he befriended a young Lorne Michaels at summer camp. By 17 he knew music would be his career, and after high school he studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
His early work was eclectic. From 1969 to 1972 he played in the jazz fusion band Lighthouse, then became music director for a short-lived TV show co-created by Michaels, and wrote music for the magician Doug Henning's stage musical Spellbound. When Michaels launched Saturday Night Live, Shore served as its musical director from 1975 to 1980, turning up in sketches such as his All-Nurse Band.
Film followed. After a low-budget thriller in 1978 he scored David Cronenberg's The Brood, beginning a partnership that has covered every Cronenberg film since except The Dead Zone. He later turned The Fly into an opera, first staged in Paris, at the Châtelet theatre, on July 2, 2008. Beyond Cronenberg he wrote for Scorsese's After Hours, Penny Marshall's Big, Tim Burton's Ed Wood and David Fincher's Seven. His score for The Silence of the Lambs earned a first BAFTA nomination; that film swept the five major Oscars, making Shore the only living composer to have scored such a winner.
Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptations brought his greatest fame. Across The Lord of the Rings and later The Hobbit trilogies he built an enormous musical world, and his three Academy Awards include one for the song Into the West, shared with Annie Lennox and Fran Walsh. He has scored more than 80 films and collected three Golden Globes, four Grammys and nine Canadian Screen Awards.
Source: Howard Shore
