James Horner, the Academy Award-winning composer whose film scores shaped dozens of modern classics including Titanic, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Field of Dreams, Aliens, and Avatar, died in the crash of a single-engine plane he was piloting, his agency confirmed Tuesday.
Authorities found the flaming wreckage of the plane, registered in Horner's name, on Monday morning. Horner was unaccounted for and presumed to be the pilot, sparking tributes from friends and collaborators like Ron Howard and Celine Dion.
In a statement to EW, his agency Gorfaine/Schwartz confirmed Horner's passing. Calls to the agency had not gone through since Monday and emails were not returned.
The statement read in part:
“It is with the deepest regret and sorrow that we mourn the tragic passing of our dear colleague, long-time client and great friend, composer James Horner. Our thoughts and prayers are with James’ family at this difficult time, and also with the millions of people around the world who loved his music. A shining light has been extinguished, which can never be replaced. It has been an honor and a privilege to have worked with James since the inception of our agency. For more than three decades, his unique creative genius made an indelible imprint on each of our lives and on those of the entire Hollywood community. There is not a person in our GSA family who wasn’t touched by the power and reach of his music, and who isn’t diminished by his loss.”
A Los Angeles native, Horner began playing piano at the age of five. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London after graduating high school, then returned to his hometown to earn a degree from the University of Southern California and a graduate degree in composition from UCLA.
Celebrated B-movie maestro Rober Corman gave Horner his first big break, hiring the young composer to write music for schlocky flicks with names like Humanoids From the Deep and Battle Beyond the Stars. Horner followed those films with 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the first major movie to feature one of his scores. (He penned the music for 48 Hours that same year.)
Horner was as versatile as he was prolific, scoring everything from tense sci-fi thrillers to animated family romps (An American Tail, The Land Before Time) to sober, sweeping Oscar bait (Glory, A Beautiful Mind). He wrote scores for 10 films released in 1993 alone, running the gamut from We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story to The Pelican Brief.
His first of nine career Oscar nods, which came in 1987, are a testament to Horner’s miraculous flexibility: Horner was nominated for writing both the ominous score for James Cameron’s Aliens and “Somewhere Out There,” An American Tale’s treacly lead ballad.
It wasn’t until 1998 -- after dozens of scores and five previous nominations -- that Horner finally struck Oscar gold. He snagged Best Original Score and Best Original Song statuettes for his Celtic-influenced contributions to James Cameron’s Titanic, perhaps Horner’s most compelling and best-known work. Titanic’s score remains history’s biggest-selling orchestral movie score; “My Heart Will Go On” also won four Grammys and a Golden Globe, and remains one of the top-selling singles ever.
“In Titanic, I challenged you to do an emotionally powerful score without violinists,” Cameron told Horner in a video message recorded in 2011, when Horner was awarded Festival Honors at the eDIT Filmmakers Festival in Frankfurt. “With the use of haunting vocals and bittersweet Celtic pipes, you reinvented the romantic score.”
Cameron and Horner would collaborate again when Horner wrote the Oscar-nominated score for 2009’s Avatar. The composer was working on music for Cameron’s Avatar sequels, the first of which is slated for 2017, at the time of his death. His work can also be heard later this year in Warner Bros. Chilean miner movie The 33 and Southpaw, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a down-on-his-luck boxer.
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/james.horner.jpg" caption="James Horner at the premiere of "Avatar" in 2009." credit="" alt="Premiere Of 20th Century Fox's "Avatar" - Arrivals"]
Though Horner’s scores could be larger than life, the composer himself had a quieter presence.
“I’m very private, and I don’t go to premieres and public things,” Horner said in a video interview this spring after Royal Albert Hall’s Titanic Live event, which saw Horner’s score brought to life by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra and a 40 piece choir. “So I never really get a sense of what an audience thinks about the music, or about a film. I’m onto the next project, and I hope for the best.”