James Newton Howard (born June 9, 1951 in Los Angeles) is a illustrious American film composer.

Biography
Throughout his prolific career, composer/musician/songwriter James Newton Howard has scored films of all scales & genres, earning multiple award nominations for his act. Howard began researching music as a little kid & went in to attend a Santa Barbara Music Academy and then majored in soft performance at a University of Southern California. Fallowing Howard left college, he toured with Elton John as a keyboardist during the late 1970s and early 1980s before moving into film music in the mid-1980s.

Per 1990s, Howard truly hit his career stride, scoring the surprise blockbuster romanticist comedy Pretty Woman (1990) and getting his number one Academy Award nomination for his score for Barbra Streisand's drama The Prince of Tides (1991). Setting a musical comedy mood for many films throughout a decade, Howard's skills encompassed the superfluity of genres, including 2 thomas more best original score Oscar nominations, the Harrison Ford actioner The Fugitive (1993) and the Julia Roberts romantic comedy My Best Friend's Wedding. Additionally, Howard scored a American larger-than-life Wyatt Earp (1994), the legal drama Primal Fear (1996), and a blockbuster M. Night Shyamalan suspense thrillers The Sixth Sense (1999) and Signs (2002). His collaborations in tunes for One Fine Day (1996) and Junior (1994) garnered Best Song nods. Along by owning scoring such little, character-caused films when Five Corners (1988), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), and American Heart (1993), Howard proved equally skilled at composing for big-budget Hollywood spectacles, including Space Jam (1996), Dante's Peak (1997), Dinosaur (2000) and Collateral (2004). Though he concentrated primarily in films, Howard has besides contributed music for TV series, earning an Emmy nomination in 1995 for his theme to NBC's ratings smash ER.

Howard is at present one of a virtually all recognized composers for film. His function inside 2004 on The Village (with violin solos by Hilary Hahn) earned him his most recent Oscar nomination. Since, he has composed for many major motion pictures, notably a score for Batman Begins which he co-wrote with Hans Zimmer. In 14 October 2005, it was officially announced that Howard would replace Howard Shore as composer for King Kong, due to "differing creative aspirations for the score" between Shore & director Peter Jackson.